To Perceive Is To Suffer
by Wraithwitch
Summary: It has long been known, Watson is an unreliable narrator. What he wrote in The Strand about the adventure at Reichenbach however  was an outright lie. The truth rests here.
1. Chapter 1

**London – 1891**

There is a man sitting at a writing desk, a leather bound cream-paged journal open in front of him. A pen lies in his hand, the nib still dry and un-inked. He sits, his elbows resting on the green baize of the desk, his gaze anchored heavily upon the large glass weight of his inkwell.

His blue eyes are the colour of iolite, but any sparkle they ought to contain has been worn and washed away, the skin around them is grey-tinted and lined. He appears to be waiting. Should someone observe him from the doorway of his study, it would not be immediately apparent what he was waiting for.

The fire is lit, and a cup of tea which has been allowed to cool, forgotten, sits besides his papers - so he cannot be waiting for the maid. His coat and hat are hung in their proper place upon the rack, so he cannot be waiting to make an appointment. And a quality to the stillness and his pose suggests he doesn't expect a visitor. Yet still, he is waiting.

He is waiting for the world to right itself.

Change, he realizes, is insidious. It is an inconsequential drip that falls a drop at a time, forcing one to blink and shake one's head as if it is a raindrop fallen too close to the eye, or a tear perhaps. But those single drips of water, ignored as a minor irritation, all too soon have become a flood that seeks to drown one...

He is drowning now.

And as he waits for his heart to stop, he wonders why he never saw the signs. Saw but did not observe...

The hand that clasps the pen tightens in pained memory. Seventeen steps. Seventeen hundred moments where change happened and he did not take a stand – did not shout 'stop!' - and now the flood has come to drown him.

The world has been unstable before; but for the past six years, at the thirteenth hour, there has always been one who appeared to set it to rights once more. He should be here now – he is late, even by his slovenly idea of time-keeping. A shadow that appears in the doorway, unkempt and unannounced (although his reputation always proceeds him), wearing his own face (or someone else's) and some inane comment tumbling from his lips. (The one that comes to mind right now was when Lestrade was in tow, complaining bitterly. "Excuse me a moment," he told the inspector blithely, "whilst I pay attention to _his _complaint – I'll be attending to yours momentarily." Then the schoolboy smile and the expectant eyebrow awaiting Watson's displeasure whilst the inspector, temporarily dismissed, fumed.)

Watson looks to the doorway, allowing himself one final foolish hope, and his friend one final slender chance. The doorway remains empty, mockingly so, the hallway beyond it silent.

With a defeated look, John Watson wets his pen and at last begins to write.

_It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished. In an incoherent and, as I deeply feel, an entirely inadequate fashion, I have endeavored to give some account of my strange experiences in his company from the chance which first brought us together at the period of the "Study in Scarlet," up to the time of his interference in the matter of the "Naval Treaty"-and interference which had the unquestionable effect of preventing a serious international complication. It was my intention to have stopped there, and to have said nothing of that event which has created a void in my life which the lapse of time has done little to fill. My hand has been forced, however, by the recent letters in which Colonel James Moriarty defends the memory of his brother, and I have no choice but to lay the facts before the public exactly as they occurred. I alone know the absolute truth of the matter, and I am satisfied that the time has come when no good purpose is to be served by its suppression. As far as I know, there have been only three accounts in the public press: that in the Journal de Geneve on May 6th, 1891, the Reuter's despatch in the English papers on May 7th, and finally the recent letter to which I have alluded. Of these the first and second were extremely condensed, while the last is, as I shall now show, an absolute perversion of the facts. It lies with me to tell for the first time what really took place between Professor Moriarty and Mr. Sherlock Holmes..._

* * *

NOTES:

The title 'To perceive is to suffer' is a quote by Aristotle

"It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen..." - extract from 'The Adventure of the Final Problem' by ACD


	2. Chapter 2

**London – 1894**

"Don't look so bloody smug."

"_I'm not smug. It's just the unfortunate shape of my face."_ Those were the last words spoken, accompanied by a bland sort of smile that hid a multitude of sins – or should have - but this time it hid nothing at all, and the inspector doesn't like it.

That was four minutes ago, and the man in question has left. The inspector still doesn't like it. Lestrade has been silent, but it is not a vacuous silence, more the silence of a terrier with its mouth full of rat, puzzling out how best to eat it without being bitten.

Clarky knew that quality of silence well, knows too the sharp and slightly irritated look of a man who could see a lot from where he stood and didn't care for any of it. It was no feat of intellect to know Holmes was the one responsible for both the silence and the expression, which were pointed at the doorway through which he'd exited.

Clarky shifts his weight surreptitiously from the ball of one foot to the other. The knack was never the discovery of what had vexed Lestrade, that was the easy bit. The knack – the real craft of it and key to whether his working life would be bearable for the next hour – was knowing what question Lestrade was asking in the privacy of his own skull and getting him to voice the damn thing instead of just chewing on it.

He nods at the doorway, a pointless gesture since Lestrade is facing it. "It's good to have him back," the constable offers.

The inspector makes a non-committal noise at the back of his throat.

"Didn't seem quite as he was, sir," Clarky continues, gingerly testing the conversational waters. "Not quite the swagger of the old days. Like he was tired..."

Lestrade turns on him with an incredulous look pinioned beneath furrowed brows. "Tired? He's just hared across London in disguise, spent half the night on watch duty cramped in a corner and then tackled an armed man taller an' heavier than him, had the life half choked out of him, then clocked the bastard rotten and kicked him in the nebuchadnezzars! To top it all, he was _smilin'_ when we got here!"

"Well... he's still _Holmes_, sir."

The inspector shakes his head. That's what bothered him. _Was_ he still Holmes? The insufferable and eccentric intellect is still here, still keen. But much of the arrogance that accompanied it has gone, and with it some of the verve. It makes him wonder who managed the impossible – that of knocking down Sherlock Holmes a peg or two. And he also wonders, in the months and cases that are sure to come, whether he'll wish they hadn't.

A second ineloquent noise of gruff acceptance. He rubs his gloved hands together against the chill of the city evening. "They will've got the Colonel loaded by now. C'mon, there's paper work to be done."

* * *

Lestrade was a man much put upon.

He had worked his way up to Detective Inspector, which meant he was no longer 'one of the lads' – he knew he was called 'Sour Face' behind his back and he wasn't invited out to have a drink with them as often as they indulged in the practice. But the boisterous ragging and wary distance he endured from the men under his command was preferable by far to the awkward contempt visited upon him by his superiors. The Home Secretary and his office were old-school, as was the Chief Inspector – landed Lords and gentry who viewed the detectives of the Yard akin to hunting dogs: necessary things, biddable enough, good for security, but one kept them lean and locked out of the parlour when company was around.

In other ways too he was stuck in the middle. He wasn't a stupid man, and what he lacked in sparkling intelligence, he made up with in sheer tenacity and hard work. He was not a man for whom the pertinent details of a case leapt out. But he was a man who would read the reports and check the evidence as many times as it took for those details to show themselves. This meant he was decent if stolid inspector material, but he was no Sherlock Holmes.

Given the circumstances, he should have been boon-companions with Gregson and Bradstreet, but he wasn't. (Gregson through preference – the man was a callous pole-climber who'd sell his own granny if it would help his career. Bradstreet through circumstance: he was a decent fellow and they had a liking for each other, but the high-ups kept shifting his division.) Which frequently left him with an unsatisfactory or unsympathetic ear to pour his woes into, or no ear at all.

For these reasons and for many more, Lestrade was a man much put upon who, in a kinder and more decent world, would have been treated a little better – a kindness in truth he deserved. But the London streets were far from kind, and so the inspector had developed a scowl; it was rumoured he even scowled on Christmas morning when nobody with a roof over their head and a hot cup o' cha had any business scowling. (This was a slander. But what was true was that Lestrade frowned so much he had a tiny pad of muscle over the inner edge of each brow – especially the right – which would not lie smooth even when his face was in repose.)

His brow is furrowed now, as it happens, in a way that suggests his already thinning regard for humanity is about to be sorely taxed. It usually is when someone knocks on the door to his office. "What?" he asks, schooling face and voice into some semblance of – if not goodwill, then at least not open hostility.

"It's time sir," Clarky reminds him.

A narrow smile of satisfaction graces his face. "So it is. Wouldn't want the Colonel to be late for his appointment, would we?"

Clarky offers his own milder smile in return, but his eyes betray a keenness that is just as sharp as the inspector's. "No sir."

* * *

"Stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage," the prisoner annunciates with a careful edge of leering levity. The Colonel's presence seems to fill the cell, leaving little space for the compact, pale faced inspector. Even though Lestrade has dressed with his usual care, he is somehow diminished by the clothes, his coat wears him, and he looks smaller than his actual size. Sebastian 'Bastian Rex' Moran, on the other hand, seems to fill out his clothes, adding to his stature, his latent menace swirling in the air and brooding in corners as an extra party to the interview.

Lestrade clears his throat and looks around. "Would appear to me, all-in-all, that isn't entirely accurate, given your present circumstances."

Moran smiles and his hand sweeps the air, encompassing the grey walls of the cell, the warder with his keys and even Constable Clark who is doing his best to merge with the wall he stands against. "Oh this? This is merely a temporary inconvenience, a small stumble on my path to the Celestial City."

Lestrade splutters, a sound of incredulity and annoyance. "I'm starting t' worry about your sanity. Per'aps confinement has proved to be a bit too much for you? Unless I'm mistaken, an' I'm not, you're facing a capital charge for the murder of Ronald Adair. You'll hang," he says simply.

From his vantage point, Clarky is disquieted to note the smile spread further across the Colonel's face.

"Oh really, do you honestly think so?" His pleasure has a condescending streak which widens in his voice. "Information is a most interesting commodity and you might be surprised how many ostensibly respectable people need the assistance of – oh, how would I put it? - persons able to obtain items which are not strictly above board."

His smile is fixed and his eyes hold a terrible gleam. "You, on the other hand, will not be at all surprised to hear what steps they will take to ensure that this information does not get to the ears of their peers - in some cases Peers indeed! Influence, breeding and the ability to know someone who knows someone who can put a word in the ear of the Home Secretary are mighty powers, especially when used for ill." Moran neither sits upon his cot nor paces; he stands at his ease like a man in his study about to enjoy brandy and cigars after the day's business. "In addition, by now my lawyer will have a letter from my gunsmith admitting that he has made over a dozen guns identical to my own, thereby discrediting the only real evidence against me."

The Colonel tugs at his cuffs, a fastidious gesture made facile by the sly cast to his eyes and the flash of teeth in his smile. "Unfortunately, the old chap will not be able to testify in person; fell under a hackney cab. Or a train - or perhaps fell off a ferry - I am awaiting my lawyer's account with the full details. I expect the news to arrive shortly."

Lestrade looks stony, refusing to be baited.

"What perhaps you do not fully understand, my dear Inspector, is that society is like a jungle - or perhaps a veldt. You, I see as a leopard. A fine, brave and arrogant hunter, capable on his day of bringing down the biggest of prey. However, when the pack of hyenas or wild dogs gather around, he must give up his meal and slink away, overwhelmed by the numbers of the lesser breed."

Lestrade's face has been noted on its habitual sourness but such petty scowling is nothing to the profound dislike showing upon his features now. "Really. And what does that make you?"

He dismisses the little rat's baring of its fangs with a wave of his hand. "Oh, I am what I always am: the man with the hunting rifle. I have heads of all the beasts on my trophy wall, no matter how untouchable they thought they were. But - enough of that," he says briskly. "I asked you here to talk about the future." Another gesture, this time one of welcome. "I have always thought that we have much in common..."

Seeing Lestrade start to bridle, he turns languidly, giving the impression of space, of ground to the inspector. A moment of silence for ruffled feathers to settle and he continues: "I do not mean in the terms of morals, ethics or - might I say - financial stability. I mean in that we are both very good at what we do; very solid with ground work, so as to say. We do what we do by being methodical and cautious; cutting out the variables and chance and ensuring that we get the correct result by going with the certain - or at worse the probable." His back shifts a little, turning him an inch or so towards the inspector again. "The world works in a logical and coherent fashion and, by knowing the patterns of the minds of man, you can peer into the past and predict the future. We do not work by inspiration, lightning flashes of brilliance that illuminate the problem and leaps of faith."

He stops, turns fully and gazes at Lestrade with an intense look, searing into the eyes of the man standing opposite. "And it can be so very tiring to work with, or even worse under, those who do, especially when they are proved right time after time, despite all the sane and fair forces of the Universe being against them." His voice has lost its lazy rumble, is instead pulled tight as a Thuggee cord. "I will tell you a terrible secret. The Professor was far more than a chief to me; he was an ally, a mentor who opened up a world I had not envisaged or imagined, perhaps even a friend, and yet... When I saw him fall at Reichenbach, after I had gotten over the shock at the unexpected ruthlessness of it all... What I felt was an overwhelming feeling of relief." He speaks will ill-contained, savage joy. "Relief that I would no longer be mocked and belittled. That I would not be humiliated in front of my men by a cast-off remark which he did not even consider to be harmful and did not spend a second considering. That I would not have to live in his shadow and be remembered only as one of his lackeys." His demeanor calms in the eye of his own verbal storm. "So, Inspector. Does this sound familiar to you?"

Lestrade keeps very still, willing himself to neither confirm or deny the acidic whispers and unpleasant worms in his mind. "An' what of it?"

The slow-spreading carnivore's smile is back. "How would you like to be free of that? How would you like to be in a position to be able to liberate yourself at a word? Even if you did not choose to use it, you would always have it in your pocket. A mere whisper when he is at his most bumptious, a sly word at his most arrogant. No matter what he says or does, you will always know that you are the better man because you did not give into temptation. He - he would be a different man, cowed and weakened, no longer your better, just another mortal... All I need in exchange is a simple blind eye now and then. Nothing serious; just a freedom to deal with my business without inconvenience."

Lestrade remains blank as a statue, no emotion showing although something is being built piece by piece in the dark of his eyes.

Constable Clark, who has spent the last hour (the last fifteen minutes intently) wondering just how he'd prevent Moran from killing Lestrade with his bare hands if he had a mind to, now has something new to worry about. He fears of prisoner and policeman he's been watching the wrong man... He's worked with Lestrade for seven years, and it is that mundane familiarity that allows him to see the turmoil raging behind the mask.

Still, the inspector says nothing, merely looking back at the Colonel; the silence stretches out becoming heavy in the air.

In the end, it is Moran who breaks first; he is patient, but part of a hunter's patience is knowing when to call it a day, to rest and try a new strategy. "Well, what of it? You are not the only buyer in this bazaar. I had a very eager Caledonian gentleman earlier standing where you are now..."

Suddenly Lestrade utters a short bark of laughter. "Gregson - that over-dressed Scottish long streak o'piss? I may not like 'im but he'd never take a deal like that. Damn, self congratulating lanky gob-shite doesn't think he has an equal let alone a superior! But, an' I wouldn't admit it to his face, he's as honest as the day is long." Another bark, a snap of gruff humor. "God help me, I was actually tempted!" He shakes his head. "I actually thought about your bargain."

Lestrade does not pace, but his agitation is shown by the speed at which he spits his words out. "I 'ave to admit that I'm no genius, an' I thank the Lord every day I'm not so afflicted! I couldn't do my job if I had t' rely on genius." He leans forward. "What Mr Holmes doesn't always understand is that he'd go mad if he tried t' do my job. Most criminals are dull – an' often bloody stupid. If I'm called in on a murder, the killer isn't gonna be an Italian Count with a knowledge of Oriental poisons who's gaining revenge for a thirty year old blood feud usin' a shaved baboon as a trained assassin. It'll be a drunken Billingsgate porter who came home t' find another pair o' boots in his bed." A twist of a smile. "He criticises me f' always looking for the obvious; well that's because nine times out of ten – no - ninety-nine in a hundred, the bleedin' obvious solution is the correct one! It is the bloke with the smoking revolver, the lover with a bloody knife, the heir who wanted t' hurry up his inheritance t' pay off his debts, the gin addled girl next door."

He tips back on his heels a little, sniffs and folds his arms. His voice holds a quiet intensity. "An' no, I don't like t'be treated like an idiot. I worked to become an Inspector. I walked my beat for fifteen years without the benefit of a university education or school friends to give me a hand-up the promotion ladder. I walked into dives dodging knives and brickbats on my own with only the truncheon to protect me. I've patrolled streets alone where they count a dead rozzer as an initiation into being a man. I've been hospitalised, more broken bones than I can count, I took a cobblestone to the head in Trafalgar Square. _I have earned my position by damn hard police work."_

A second's pause, and the cast of his face changes, some of the acerbity being folded away back into its box. "An' yet, I also thank the Lord that Mr Holmes has been there. He's a thief-taker, and I don't have a better word for a detective than that. There are some clever bastards out there, an' sometimes we can only follow their tracks by the trail of bodies they leave behind. An' we have to deliver the news to the families o'course. 'Avenues of enquiry', 'doin' our best', 'followin' what leads we have' isn't worth a tinker's toss t'the family. You know – well, course not, you wouldn't know - the worst thing is the accusation in the eyes. That somehow we let this happen, that we failed to keep their loved one safe." He draws himself up straighter and the feeling behind his words confer upon him a brief nobility. "I'm willing t'live with the taunts, the snide asides, the rudeness and the larkin' about for the knowledge that _he is not a mere mortal._ That when everythin' else fails, Mr Holmes will not."

A signal to Clarky, a call for the warder and a step towards the cell door. "Oh, an' Colonel?"

Moran regards him with cool and open aversion.

"You keep stalking the jungle if you want. But just remember: sooner or later, every hunter wakes up with a weight on his chest and the breath of his prey in his face." Lestrade pauses at the open door before allowing the warder to enter with shackles. "I hope to see you at your hanging. But, if this does not come to pass, just keep looking over your shoulder. I'll be there. Dull perhaps, methodical and slow-minded, but there." A smile, glass sharp but with a genuine spike of satisfaction. "Now if you're prepared, Colonel? Your audience awaits."

* * *

The public gallery is above the courtroom, like the dress-circle of a theatre. It means the angles are all wrong and Moran must tilt his head or strain his eyes to the utmost edge of their sockets. It's not a prime position for a hunter, not when he knows the tiger is near. But Moran has two things on his side; time, and the relative safety of the condemned man (being charged to hang he does not fear drowning), so he is not worried.

He takes his time as the case proceeds, keeping an ear out for details in all the words spoken as easily as his ears once distinguished the call of an animal or the flattening of grassland fauna when game was near. His expression is calm, neither confrontational nor insolently bland as he carefully scans the faces in the gallery and the clerks of the court over and over again.

He is not a man who could watch a magic show done by a master conjurer and be able to say with certainty how the prestige is achieved. His mind does not work that way. But he has over the years (like any predator) become highly proficient in singling out the odd-man. The bird-call out of place. The shadow where none should be. The break in the grass, the patch of sunlight catching strangely... In short, he has the observational skills and instincts of the best gamehunter in all India.

He is, in his way, still hunting a tiger now. A tiger he knew would be here – must be here – for how could he resist? This tiger is an old hand and very _very_ clever. He's able to shift into any shape a tiger could conceivably hold: he can be the shadow at your back or the stray tabby you pass in the street, the rug at your hearth, the medicine in the Celestial's lacquered chest, or the twin green lamps burning in the darkness...

His eyes rove the gallery again, ignoring the irritated look the barrister shoots him. _You, little man, are of no import. I however, mean to bag this tiger by fair means or foul. I exhausted fair some years back..._ There. He lets his eyes move on, never stopping always scanning, circling, showing he is still weak and confused, no threat, no threat at all... But he is certain. He has found his tiger.

It takes all of Colonel Sebastian Moran's self control not to let a smile spread across his face.

Time passes. He is allowed to address the court. This is highly irregular, but it is what he insisted on. He has little sway nowadays, but in some places Moriarty's touch lingers still, and this is what he has expended his influence on. A minute, nothing more, in which to address the court. He could tell his story, but it would not be believed. He is a disgrace to his uniform, a cad and a criminal and the man he speaks against is lorded in London as some sort of modern saint. It would not do. Besides, even as a blackguard in disgrace he has his pride – he is still a gentleman. One does not snivel and cry and fling mud. One straightens one's back and accepts one's fate with dignity... and delivers a last low shot to the stomach – a gift to fester and bleed so that the enemy might remember the one who gave it.

His voice is rich, and rolls with gentle force, bending the ears of all who hear like that of the very best storyteller. "I spent many years in India serving Her Majesty, and for my leisure hunting game. I took pride in my work as in my sport. Her Majesty and I came to an unfortunate disagreement and parted on poor terms. But the hunt – the game - the Great Game and I remained on the best of terms." He speaks with the kind of off-hand command that has helped keep the British Empire running even when it shouldn't.

"In my life I have tracked and bagged many creatures. I respected them all, for their cunning and ferocity. But none do I revere more than the White Tiger. He without doubt has been the worthiest of adversaries. I first tried my mettle against him in London, but I was arrogant and underestimated him shamefully; he escaped me with ease. I followed him to foreign soil. In Switzerland he stopped to drink and I hoped to bag him, but distance and the wind were against me - I seared his whiskers, nothing more." The court is silent, as if it is a dinner party and Moran guest of honour, giving a speech to the table.

"I followed his trail as far as I could: across Europe, ever Eastwards towards the Orient, where at last I lost him and was forced to abandon the hunt. I returned home to lick my wounds and console myself with the reminder that whilst a huntsman tracks, a master waits. I waited, crafting my plans and laying my bait for the tiger's return... And return he did."

He smiles, a strange fixed smile, like a person who's seen something that only one with a very odd and mildly unpleasant sense of humour would find funny. He clears his throat, an affectation, recalling his own and his audience's attention. "I set a trap for the White Tiger. Alas, this time, the tiger won not just the battle but the war." He lifts his hand in a mimed salute. "I raise my glass to him. I shall pay for what I've done and the reckoning will doubtless be swift."

The smile is back, imperceptibly wider and more dangerous than before. "His reckoning will take years I've no doubt. I will have tomorrow. He will have a thousand tomorrows and have to suffer through them all..."

He looks up to the public gallery and to the stiff-backed mealy-faced and bespectacled gentleman he'd singled out earlier. He locks gazes with him, and him alone. "So I raise my glass – to Sherlock Holmes – _in absentia_. I have no doubt whatsoever that in the fullness of time, I shall see him in hell. _We'll keep the brandy warmed."_

The gallery is in uproar, people shouting down his speech and the fact he was allowed to speak at all. Moran doesn't care. He smiles, like a cat that has got the cream, as the mealy-faced gent goes ashen and fights his way through the press of people and out of the court.

His shot has caught its mark. The White Tiger may have won, but Moran has just ensured it is the most bitter of Pyrrhic victories.

* * *

NOTES:

Nebuchadnezzars – balls

Celestial – archaic term for a Chinese person


	3. Chapter 3

There is a gentle knock at the door, the brass handle turning a moment later to reveal the starched apron and solemn face of the house-maid. (She always looked solemn, Watson had long since decided it was her default expression.)

"Yes, Alice?"

"Begging pardon, sir, there's a gentleman who wishes to see you."

He sighs, the soft sound of a good man who knows his work is never done. "I don't hold surgery on Fridays – why is this so difficult for people to grasp?"

Alice blushes slightly and looks at the floor, unhappy that she has put the doctor to difficulty. "I'll tell him you're not to be disturbed, sir..."

"No, no, well he's here now." A sudden thought. "He's not bleeding on the carpet or anything like that, is he?"

The corner of the maid's lips twitch in a smile, the doctor's a funny one – always so calm but with that double-edge to his voice and she can never decide if he's joking or whether he'd rather she answered 'yes' or 'no' to that sort of question. "Oh, no sir, he seems well enough." She looks for some sign of disappointment or relief, but the doctor just runs a hand across his brow, banishing his own weariness and tugs his jacket straight.

"Send him in then."

She bobs a not-quite curtsey (Mrs Watson had tried to school her out of the habit, saying it made her feel quite the ninny to be lauded in such a way in her own home) and leaves to fetch the visitor.

When she returns, Watson is surprised to see it's with the old bookseller in tow. (He'd been at St Bart's earlier in the day on business for the Yard; as medical examiner on the Wesley-Jenkins case. Just outside the hospital on the corner of High Holburn, despite his best efforts of evasion he'd been careered into by a man with an armful of books.)

The doctor's impression of him when they collided on the street was brief: a gaunt face and a mane of dirty-white hair, an irascible, scratchy voice, a crooked frame packaged in an old suit and char-coloured greatcoat. Now in the light of his study Watson sees also the bushy brows, the thread-bare cuffs, the milky faded eyes and the tremor to the hands that clutch so tightly to their precious books.

"You're surprised to see me, sir," the gentleman says, sounding more jovial than he did in their previous encounter.

Watson nods, feeling a little dazed. There is something wrong with this scene, but he's unable to put his finger on it precisely and it's distracting him.

"Well, I've a conscience, sir," the bibliophile continues, as if his character had been called in to question on that account. "When I chanced to see you go into this house, as I came hobbling after you, I thought to myself, I'll just step in and see that kind gentleman, and tell him that if I was a bit gruff in my manner there was not any harm meant, and that I am much obliged to him for picking up my books."

_Thus proving no good deed goes unpunished,_ the doctor thinks wryly. Monday to Thursday are the days he runs his surgery, Fridays are reserved for the Yard and Saturday he travels to the clinic in Clarkenwell and does what works of charity he can. He has things to set in order if he hopes not to spend most of Sunday hunched over his desk; he is tired and looking forward to an early supper followed by a brandy as he works for an hour or so before bed. Playing host to a stranger who's followed him all the way from Bart's like a stray cat is upsetting his schedule. "You make too much of a trifle," he says, trying to wave the incident away. "May I ask how you knew who I was?"

"Well, sir, if it isn't too great a liberty, I am a neighbour of yours, for you'll find my little bookshop at the corner of Church Street and Edgware, and very happy to see you, I am sure. Maybe you collect yourself, sir?"

Watson wonders if perhaps his geography has deserted him and the upper end of Edgware is in fact several roads eastwards to where he'd previously supposed its position to be. Or perhaps the bibliophile was just of the sort to consider all of the city his neighbour, geography go hang... He realises the old man has spoken again. "I'm sorry?"

"I asked if maybe you collect yourself, sir?" He looks around the study, his gaze fumbling over the shelves of medical texts above the desk and alighting with joy upon the glass-fronted case against the far wall. He totters in that direction, squinting at the spines of Carlyle, Roussaux, Voltaire, and Thackery through the glass, mumbling and nodding at the titles. "Well here – you must have something – a token for your chivalry as it were..." He swings back, dithering for a moment and puts down his bundle of books with the same care a parent might show a child. "Here's 'British Birds' – no, no that will not do. 'The Holy War' perhaps? Hmm. 'Catullus' – no, but something classical. Aurelius! Yes, that will do nicely." Triumphantly he grips a slender volume smartly bound in ox-blood leather; an old printing but not too badly foxed. "Marcus Aurelius' Meditations." He bestows it upon the doctor with a nervous gravitas, anxious that he has made the right choice.

Watson accepts it with a smile and thanks composed of grace and confusion. "Really – you're too kind, I..."

"_I insist,"_ the bookseller says quickly.

Watson strives to keep from frowning as again he is prodded by the thought that something is not right: there is some fact he is ignorant of, and if he only knew it the whole situation would unfold in a very different light. The knowledge that he is missing something important – and is certain he is – is discomforting in the extreme. Like one of those optical illusions where one is supposed to be able to perceive two faces in profile and all he can see is the damn vase. "Thank you," he says, because he can think of nothing else to say.

The bookseller smiles, and for a moment the expression looks strained, but then he is moving again, gathering up his errant volumes, and Watson wonders if he imagined it. "Perhaps you will drop by – Morrison and Rigby – I'm Morrison, and truth be told there's no longer a Rigby – on the corner of Church Street, we'd be glad to see you." He offers his hand, realises it is his left and manages to rearrange his books without dropping them to proffer his right instead.

Watson shakes his hand. "I shall. Thank you for coming by, and thank you for _Aurelius."_

The old bookseller is tottering towards the door. "Think nothing of it, nothing of it." He pauses as he steps from the study, looking back for a moment. "Well. Good day," he says.

"Good day," Watson responds, watching him depart.

It is only hours later, after both supper and brandy, when his eyes alight once more on the little volume that he realises the bookseller uttered not 'good day' as one would to a stranger, but 'good bye' as one would to a friend. For reasons he still cannot fully grasp he remains uneasy about the whole encounter.

Leaning back in his chair he eyes the book, rather like a fakir with a new cobra, and reluctantly picks it up. He opens it; there is an inscription on the fly-leaf dated 1892. The penmanship is strong and angular, clearly written by a man. The width of the nib-strokes are constant, thickening only on the signature; it was an inscription that had been carefully thought out before it was written in one fluid dash, the nib only re-dipped at the end, suggesting perhaps the scriber had considered a longer signature and not just a monogram.

_~For all we must endure_

_That can never be forgiven~_

_Yours,_

_in solitude,_

_H_

Watson tries to swallow past the tightness in his throat and finds he cannot. The book is second hand, he reminds himself, given to him through a chance encounter with a stranger. 'H' likely stands for Henry or Herbert or Humphrey or Hemmingway or Hastings or any other number of names Christian or Familial that England is awash with. It is not a note penned for him. But the echo of sentiment, the resonance it stirs in his soul, is all the more painful for that.

* * *

At the corner of Manchester Street a man straightens his back against the wall and then slides down it to crouch on the pavement, dropping his pack of books. His hands are shaking as he clutches at his head, eyes shut fast, mouth a narrow line turned down at either end. "Idiot – _idiot!"_ he growls in frustration, his voice younger than his appearance suggests. He blinks, rubbing at his eyes, and the moisture in them chases the milky dye from their irises, revealing a darker and infinitely more pained colour beneath. He is shivering as the last spikes of adrenalin are drowned out in despair.

"_C'est vraiment de ta faute,"_ he tells himself. _"Connard!" _He stays in that position, body sagged against the wall, the only animation coming from his lips as he continues to swear brokenly in French.

It begins to rain, cold stinging drops like a reprimand from heaven. They fall upon the man and his pile of books; he allows both with equal indifference.

At last – and although it seems an age to him it has been minutes and nothing more – he levers himself to his feet, pushing away from the wall and walking like one drunk or bereft onwards into the darkening streets of the city.

The books sit where he left them, at the corner of Manchester Street, the raindrops battering upon their covers and slowly dampening them to ruin.

* * *

The walls are a pale pea-green, the floorboards dark-stained and with much of their varnish scuffed. It's small; stuffy in summer and bitter in winter, but still it is his office. It is like a badge of rank, a sign of battles hard won as well as a comrade in arms in all the battles to come. And he is quietly proud of it; creaking chair, overstuffed file cabinets and all.

He tips back in his chair (it creaks, an alarming sound like a last straw breaking, but he doesn't hear it).

Something is niggling at the back of Inspector Lestrade's head.

It's like a flea bite being rubbed by the seam of a shirt; a small and constant irritation that can't be banished no matter how much he picks at it. But as has been remarked upon by many, what he lacks in genius Lestrade more than makes up for in patience: so he scratches away at the corners of thoughts throughout the day, bit by bit unearthing what it is that bothers him.

It isn't until quarter past five when Constable Clark taps quietly at the door and then enters to bring him a cup of tea and the reports on the Wesley-Jenkins case, that Lestrade is able to forge enough of his disquiet together into a thought that could be verbalised. He takes the cup and its forever cracked and Indian-ink-stained saucer and finds a place for it amidst the ordered clutter of his desk. "Constable?"

"Yes sir?"

"Did you happen to see Mr Holmes arrive at court this morning?"

"I did sir." More accurately he had seen a steel-haired and pastey-faced gent with an obnoxiously purple cravat enter the court and, as the gent had passed him, he'd smiled ever so slightly and muttered, _'Clarky'_ in greeting. "He was in the gallery sir."

The ever-present scowl deepens. "I didn't see him."

"He was disguised sir."

Lestrade makes a _hrmph_ of irritation.

"Left in quite a hurry too sir. After the Colonel made his speech, when there was that ruckus due to what he said."

The disquiet is now not only forged, but forged into something the inspector doesn't like the look of at all. Holmes' disguises, Watson's absence, Moran's smugness, society's ignorance...

When the detective requested those few of the Yard who knew of his return to keep it quiet, Lestrade assumed it was all part of the Moran case. Believed that soon after he would stage a return to London in a suitably theatrical style. Now... now he fears he's entirely missed his mark. "I don't like it," he grumbles to his teacup. "Be happier when I know Moran's at the end of a rope and Mr Holmes is back in Baker Street with the doctor."

"Everything in its proper place, as per usual," Clarky quips with a smile.

Lestrade looks at him blankly.

He doesn't shuffle his feet, but he has the slightly sheepish look of one who'd dearly like to. "Sir."

"Suppose that bloody rat Murdock was at court too..." Lestrade in his time has been accused of looking 'ferrety', but in fairness his features are more pleasing and infinitely less vermin-like than those of Murdock, a reporter for the _Police Gazette_ with a line in sensationalism that runs a mile wide. The inspector hadn't seen the newsman, he'd been watching Moran and scowling a good deal, but it was a sure bet he'd been there.

Clarky looks troubled. "Sir, the Colonel's speech..."

Lestrade grimaces and swallows a mouthful of scalding tea.

"Do you think Murdock'll - I mean..."

His voice is a growl, but his ire isn't aimed at the constable. "Do I think Murdock'll pick up on all that rot about tigers an' know he was talkin' about Holmes? No, I don't. The man's a bleedin' fantasist but even he ain't gonna say Holmes is back from the dead. Oh, he'll write a page o'swill makin' out he knows who Moran meant an' swearin' he'll reveal all tomorrow. Never will." He sniffs. "Christ, any penny-whore who did that'd get a slap, yet all o'London takes it from the press-men an' queues up f'more."

The constable wonders how he can leave Lestrade's office without it looking like he's creeping away. The inspector is becoming both dour and acerbic – not a combination that boded well.

But instead of the expected rant there is a question instead. "You on the beat, Constable?"

"Yes sir. Start at six in Bread Street Ward Sir."

The inspector nods absently.

Clarky pauses. "Do you need an errand run, or somebody checked up on, sir?"

For a second Lestrade's scowl lessens and it seems he is about to agree; but his expression toughens again almost immediately. "Don't be bloody ridiculous. This is Scotland Yard, not a working charity." His voice drops a notch. "Silly bastard can look after himself," he affirms stoutly.

"Sir."

* * *

NOTES

Manchester Street – at the time of _The Adventure of the Empty House_ I believe Watson was living in Kensington, but it was more convenient to have him in Paddington, so there =P

C'est vraiment de ta faute. Connard! - French: This is your fault. Idiot!

Breadstreet Ward – the City of London is divided into Wards and Parishes. Bread Street is between St Paul's and the Bank of England.

Colonel Moran's hanging - In _The Adventure of the Illustrious Client_ (set in 1902) Holmes mentions Moran is still alive. Moran is also mentioned in _His Last Bow_ as an example of those of Holmes's many adversaries who have futilely sworn revenge against him.


	4. Chapter 4

The Rookery of St Giles is an entire shanty town pressed into the space of a single city block. Thieves and forgers, murderers and whores live there; the dregs of society with nowhere further left to sink. Those who live lower than the gutter and if they look to the stars see nothing but fog, and the boot-heels of their fellow men.

Most accommodation in the Rookery is damp, rotten, slurry-stained, overcrowded and smelling of any number of unpleasant excretions both human and animal. It's not uncommon for eight or more people to share a room, nor is it uncommon to wake up with a corpse in one's midst, as disease, privation or a penny-shiv have taken their toll and an unfortunate's life during the night.

There is one room at St Giles, larger, dryer, warmer, cleaner and far less crowded than all the others – it is, if slums can have such a thing, the grand penthouse suite – although that isn't saying much. The windows have not only glass panes but curtains, the floor has a rug; both are worn and faded but hold a memory of colour, pattern and better days in their weave. There is even a fireplace housing a small blaze and a smaller copper kettle.

There are three occupants in the room; a man who sits by the fire, steaming as the rain evaporates from his coat, a woman with ratty blonde hair and a suggestively pink dress who's edging towards the door, and a younger woman who is pacing.

The younger woman wears a boy's morning coat over a rag-tag concoction of layered petticoats and corsetry; mismatched matron's gloves warm her hands. Her hair is dark; when the firelight catches it, it turns the colour of congealed blood. The viper's nest of curls is badly pinned, giving her the air of the deranged spinster aunt whom nobody talks about. Her face is unmarred by disease, but her marl-blue eyes are several lifetime's old and bruised with shadows. Her voice is fraught and low.

"I said it didn't I? Never saw it – never saw it – an' I always see the end, don't I? Whether I want to or not... I told you – knew he weren't made t'drown, was why I laughed at all them black bands, silly bleeders weepin' an' wailin'..."

The man at the hearth stretches his fingers closer towards the fire. "Emmy, wot the 'ell you talkin' about now, girl?"

"You put something in your pipe?" the blonde woman asks with a strained, rictus smile.

"Shut y'face, Jenny Penny," is the sharp retort. "Y'know I never touch the stuff."

"Sometimes I wish you would," she mutters. Jen never knows what to do when Emmy has one of her nights – and tonight is proving to be a particularly bad one. Lord knows what set her off.

"It pays t'watch, always pays t'watch... All that crush o'water couldn't take 'im, weren't where he was headed..." she tells the skirting board, hooking her fingers into claws and latching them onto her wrists beneath the sundry coverings of cloth.

"Emmy..."

"The boss-cat went, everybody knows a cat can drown in tuppence of water and that was more than tuppence – so cold and so far..."

Jen silently appeals to the man at the hearth for help, but Davey ignores her, watching the flames instead, damn him. She rallys herself, approaching the other woman like an arachnophobe trying to trap a spider in a cup. "Emmy, stop it – sit down for godsake! Oh god, I hate it when you scratch at your arms like that – Emmy please..." The door opens and she looks to the newcomer hopefully for aid. "Charlie!" she greets the tall, sodden young man, not giving him time to warm or dry himself. "Ere, thank god, she's 'avin' a right turn. Look t'her would you? I'll get us a shant o'gin."

Emmy's monologue breaks and she snaps, "I don't want any bloody gin!"

"Well I bloody do!" Jen cuts back as she flees.

"Emmy – Emmy! What is it?"

"Trouped in an' out all day," Davey mutters, knowing both that the young man wants the explanation and that it won't do him the slightest good to have it. "Jeb and Lizzy came from the city, Brent from the docks. Was after Old Lil came by, gave 'er news from Marylebone, an' she went glocky."

Charlie stands in front of her, holding her by the shoulders, needing to anchor her in the here and now. "C'mon, leave yer arms alone, tell me..."

She twitches, attention shifting to the face before her: skin pale with chill, hair plastered flat, eyes a deep green tinged with worry. She lifts a hand to wipe some of the raindrops from his cheek. "Oh Charlie you ain't drowned – I ain't havin' you drowned jus' 'cos he's back – no, no - nobody's f'drownin' tonight!"

He hugs her close, trying to soothe her mounting agitation. "Is alright, is just a bit of rain is all, I'm still here, I'm here."

She quiets in his arms. After a moment, muffled by his coat but in a voice both calm and put-upon she says, "You're all wet."

He laughs, releasing her. "Rain's a bugger for it." He gives Davey a nod, drags over a footstool to the hearth and sinks down with a sigh which might be relief or might be fortification for all that's to come. "Now. What's got you in a fit?"

Her head tips to the side and she blinks at him, entirely mystified. A fit – she's in a fit? Then her thoughts tumble lose and she suddenly grins, childish and manic. "He's come back!"

"Who's come back?"

"_The Don Jack."_

In stark contrast to her glee his expression is pained. "No – no Emmy, don't start this again – please don't. Christ... He's dead."

She shakes her head. "He ain't."

Charlie rubs at his eyes with a grimace. He can't cope with this again. It has been two years – longer – since she's been that bad and for his money it was the bloody Don's death that set her off. Irritation sparks as if he hopes to bully her back to sense. "So all o'London was wrong then? Sea o'bloody sackcloth, letters t'the papers, all that wailin' and gnashin' o'teeth – waste o'bleedin' time was it?"

She grins then and starts to giggle as if it's the greatest joke of all.

"It's not bloody funny! He's gone, all right?"

"His Crow wrote it up an' everythin' – papers were full of it," Davey rumbles in Charlie's support.

"He drowned Emmy – remember?" Please let her not have forgotten, please god let her not start again...

"He ain't soaked," she says clearly.

Charlie sighs, head hanging in defeat. He looks up at her and waits with long suffering patience. Emmy has quite a few names amongst the different cants of the city, unlike the Rook or Old Jago, no one seemed happy to settle for just one moniker. 'The Giles Witch' or just 'the Witch' was growing strong however, and Charlie thinks it's easy to see why.

Emmy has senses cracked open too wide; she sees everything, hears everything, a thousand little details driving though her head like a pound of copper tacks. Her thoughts jump unsteadily across the ice-flow of information, barely able to focus on eating breakfast let alone anything else, until some question or event pulls facts and thoughts to it like iron to a load-stone and she'll suddenly say 'this will happen' or 'he'll do that', 'he hid it there' or 'that's what she's up to'. It's as uncanny as it is off-putting.

But since (as Charlie's mother had said for the scant time she was alive) even a shilling has two sides, for every flash of insight there was always a long night of madness as every thought strained at the leash and sought to flee her head. It remained to be seen whether Emmy's current state was because her mind was about to be brilliant or whether it was being a bloody mess in payment for some brilliance of the past.

"He's back," she tells him, eyes wide and tone conspiratorial. "Out o' twig as usual - cunning bleeder... London's got the Don Jack back!" she crows, twirling round as if she can dance a jig for the heart of the city.

"Don't be daft," Davey opinions.

She stops abruptly, off kilter, joy sinking into horror in an instant. "But he won't last..." Her eyes flicker, reading something writ in the air invisible to all but her, her breath catching in her throat. "No," she moans. "Oh – no – no no no..."

Charlie is on his feet in an instant. "Emmy!"

"Old Sour Face won't find 'im in time – late again – an' the dragon'll have 'im!" She is taut as a bow-string, her hands clenched into fists, nails digging into her palms, shivering. "No!"

"Christ, stop screamin', please Emmy..." He shakes her and then staggers as she drops from his grasp like a corpse, landing heavily on her knees, head bowed. He kneels close, his hand to the side of her face, tangling in her hair as he tries to get her to look at him, to acknowledge something real. "Emmy?"

"I ain't wearin' black for 'im," she spits, a desperate iron edge creeping into her voice. "We gotta find 'im."

Charlie makes an exasperated noise, the beginnings of a protest on the futility of searching for a man everyone knows is dead and buried.

Her head snaps up and she glares at him, eyes a deranged blue. "D'you believe me?"

"I..."

"_Do you believe me?"_ she demands.

He looks at her, deeply, fondly, and his mouth twitches at the corner into a sorry smile. "I always believe you Emmy, you know I do."

She nods, still shaken in the wake of her personal storm, but satisfied. "We gotta find the Don Jack 'fore he does for 'imself. There ain't much time."

"How you gonna do it?" Davey asks, turning away from the flames for an instant. "Can't scour the city in a night. 'Specially not a night like this." Looming large in the undertone of his words is also 'and not for a ghost', but saying so aloud would only spark another argument.

Her head cants to the side, a devious expression lighting her features, making her look vixen-like and hungry. "No need. He'll be in the Ratcliffe."

"How..."

She speaks quickly, running through the explanation like someone pelting across a log, worried it might spin and throw her off at any second. "He'll pick a flash-house not a gent's club f'what he's doin'." A blink. "He ain't _here_... Black Nick an' Cheapside Bill do skirt, not smoke. Jago's Isle's got smoke a-plenty, but it's harder t'get to without a boatman an' he'll want t'walk on his own two feet without trippin' over ten Lascars and six bully boys lookin' for a mandrake. Leaves the Mint an' the Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe's got the most Flower Houses - Yellow King's stock in trade. Stands t'reason."

"Still leaves us a lot of lookin', girl," Davey complains. "Steppin' on the Rook's toes or that yellow bugger t'do it, too."

She ignores him, thoughts and patterns weaving together in her mind until she's sifted probabilities to reach the most likely answer. "Be somewhere not too dossy, not too classy neither – jus' 'cos it's a flash-house don't mean he wants t'lie in a puddle o'piss - he's got some dignity. One of the Dens on Gun Lane off Commercial." She nods, the single dipping of her chin a signal to the world that all she has said is irrefutable.

The door opens to admit Jenny and a bottle of gin; the whore opens her mouth to announce her return, but shuts it again when she sees Emmy and Charlie kneeling on the floor, Emmy with that particular look she's grown to loath.

"We'll need his Crow – an' that spike o'his so he's on the up. Sour Face won't give us the time o'day like as not... Find Clarky – he'll be in Bread Street Ward - he's a good Ketch, he'll listen."

"Aw god Emmy," Charlie rocks back on his heals. "Why'd we 'ave t'go near any of 'em?" He does not often speak against her when she's so single minded, but he has a lifelong dislike of the Yard.

She rises to her feet: Queen Victoria herself commanding armies in her splendour could not be more self-possessed. She stalks towards Jenny and takes the grimy gin tumbler, draining off a mouthful before returning it. "Give the word," she orders the room in general. "I want runners t'fetch the Crow an' Clarky. Tell 'em to high tail it t' the Gun or they'll be wearin' sackcloth tomorrow."

Jenny looks from Charlie to Davey and back again. "Who's she on about?"

Heading out the door, ivory pipe in hand, eyes glinting, Emmy's lips split into a grin. "The Don Jack," she says as she leaves.

"Wot - _Sherry?"_ She stares incredulously at the woman's retreating back and then at Charlie as he trails after. "But he's dead!"

Her lieutenant shrugs his narrow shoulders. "Not yet he ain't."

* * *

NOTES

Rookeries – Rookeries were slums in the city, rife with crime and disease. Ones of note were: Jago's Isle, St Giles (also known as Seven Dials), The Mint, Petticoat Lane, Old Nichol Street and the Ratcliffe/Radcliffe. In the real world the rookeries had been cleared by the 1880s, but in this fiction they still thrive and are run by Old Jago, the St Giles Witch, Marmalade Jack, Cheapside Bill, and Black Nick respectively. The Ratcliffe is 'shared' by the Yellow King (Chen) and the Rook, with Chen running the opium dens and the Rook dealing with all other business.

Shant 'o gin – a bottle of gin

Glocky - mad

Don Jack – Great/Clever Detective.

Crow - doctor

Out of twig – unknown, in disguise.

The dragon - opium

Flash house - a public house patronized by criminals.

Mandrake - homosexual

Flower House – opium den

Ketch – policeman (taken from Jack Ketch the hangman in Punch & Judy shows)

Sherry – from 'Sherridan Hope' a name Doyle considered for Holmes and which I've decided he uses when slumming it.


	5. Chapter 5

The Chinaman bows automatically, his greasy queue slipping over the heavy ivory and yellow silk of his robe. He addresses his words to the floor. "Ladee, well-come, well-come, pretty ladee, have pipe, velly good, have what you wan..."

"I think you do," her tone is acerbic.

He looks up at her then, obsequiousness faltering as he recognizes who is stood in the doorway. Victoria Regina may be an Empress, but London has many petty kings and queens, people of note and influence who have nothing to do with titles or money and everything to do with territory. St Giles is a patron to beggars, outcasts and lunatics, which made the woman who rules in his name thrice-worthy. "You velly well-come in ouh house..." he lisps awkwardly, gamely trying to play the fool.

She isn't buying it. "Don't piss me about, I know you can talk proper. I ain't here for your yen an' you know it."

His deferential air vanishes along with the lisp and he straightens up. "Why you here?"

"On th' gander f'someone."

A sly look suffuses his smooth features. "We have boys, nice boys, girls too," he leers.

"Fuck off, Lung," she tells him shortly, trying to move past him.

"You not welcome if you not smoke."

Her pale eyes are focused, dangerously so. "Chen's got brighter hoke t'play than puttin' my nose outta joint," she warns. "Ain't gonna be pissin' in his pie, so you leave me be."

The queen of St Giles is mad, everyone knows that. But she is loved more than she is feared – against all Machiavellian principle – and still holds fast the crown. The waifs and strays she protects are fiercely loyal despite her weakness – maybe because of it – and crossing her is just as inadvisable as squaring off against the Rook, Marmalade Jack, or Jago himself.

"Chen busy man. He not..."

"Suits me, I don't need Chen," she says with a sweetness bordering venom. "I need you t'shut y'trap least I say an' leave me be least I ask. Got it?"

A moment's hesitation and he bows, with real courtesy this time. "Lady," he mutters.

She pushes past him and into the den, Charlie following unhappily in her wake. She walks with strange and pointed step, like one of the Royal Ballet rats practicing chorus paces, booted feet placed with the utmost care. She skirts the rooms, fingers twitching as if following an invisible string only they could grasp, glancing at shadows and prone figures briefly before moving on. It is like a perverse sort of faerytale: that room is too crowded, that one too bright. The next room's too loud, that one too... female. Her head tips for a moment as she notes the women present at the Sapphic symposium, those highborn and low, squirreling the information away for later. The corridor turns and turns again, the rooms smaller now, more secluded. Her fingers point like a neurotic weathervane, and a grim smile graces her mouth. One of the rooms has a worn damask curtain in hues of red and gold drawn across the door. She suddenly stops. "Charlie," she hisses, her voice strained.

He is at her elbow immediately, a lanky and dirt-begrimed Mephistopheles.

But he's not the only one who answers her summons. Lung has haunted her wake, and now hovers; an anxious and ineffectual guard dog. If she needed proof – which she doesn't – that provided it. "He pay good money to be left. No one visit. I refill pipe. You not to..."

Her attention skitters away from burning a hole in the curtain and back to him in irritation. Her voice is a hod of bricks tipped haphazardly from on high to break skulls where they will. "I don't give a fuck if he paid with the Maharajah's diamonds. Hop it."

An expression of panic flashes through his narrow eyes and is discarded as swiftly as he is able. "Chen, he not pleased if..."

"_I call in my debt,"_ she says with cut-glass clarity. "The first an' least of 'em at any rate..."

Behind her Charlie bites his lip to hide his smile.

"So quit fuckin' me about. I'm goin' in 'ere. An' you ain't. Clear?"

Lung's face curdles - an amusing little pantomime of his thoughts - before he admits defeat. Chen would not thank him for starting a war with the _ngong baht-paw hai_. Reluctantly he bows again, backing away. _"Hou sei la lei,"_ he murmurs politely.

_"Hm ga tsan."_

"'Ere, when you learn that yellow jaw?" Charlie demands, keeping half an eye on the retreating Lung.

She doesn't look round, but doesn't answer until the Chinaman has gone either. "Didn't," she says shortly. "Can spit a right storm though."

One hand pushes the curtain aside, the other grasps the handle, movements mechanical like someone dreading an outcome already foreseen. She takes in the dim room in an instant, eyes perceiving everything despite the scant light cast by the single lamp flagged by joss sticks. Whatever air remains in her lungs is expelled in a single ragged breath. "Send word," she says.

Charlie nods, although her interest isn't for him, it is only for the slight man lain upon the daybed.

"Fetch the Crow. Tell the Ketch. Now. He's here." She steps forward, curtain falling back and door swinging closed, cutting Charlie loose to follow her instructions and contracting her world to a single room of shabby Eastern decadence.

The space is small, containing two carved bunks at either side and a chaise lounge at one end. A low table is positioned beside the chaise, set up with a lacquered tray on which sits all the apparatus necessary for an addicts tea party. Light comes from the spirit lamp on the tray from which the pipe can be relit each time the resin cools, and the glowing tips of two joss sticks scenting air already saturated with the golden mist of poppy smoke.

A man reclines amidst cushions on the daybed, one hand lain across his chest, palm against his heart, the other curled around the end of a pipe balanced against the table. He wears waistcoat and shirtsleeves and an intense expression as if he seeks to glean meaning from his dreams. A heavy cord frockcoat that has seen better days is cast carelessly across the arm of the chaise, one sleeve trailing on the floor beside a silk-lined fedora. His skin is pallid, his dark hair sweat-mussed into disarray giving him a younger, more vulnerable appearance.

His dark eyes close and open slowly, as if they are machinery he is operating and not a true part of himself. Thoughts are unwinding through his head, unspooling like ribbon from a bobbin. So many ribbons. He wonders how long it will take to wind them back again – wonders if they can be wound back again. He realises he doesn't much care. He plucks at this ribbon and that to see what it is made of, to read the words wrought in their stitches. Most of the colours are muted shades of dun and grey of inferior weave telling of crimes and punishment pertaining to people many of which he has never met. But some threads of colour stand out.

There is a lush plum velvet band that snakes away into the darkness, going who knows where and leaving the faintest trace of Parisian perfume in its wake. There is a dark hunter-green, cheering and sturdy which is at pains not to tangle itself with anything else. A black silk of the highest sheen lies in fat coils and gives the impression of being smug. A russet of just the wrong hue and width and an aura of scaevity ensuring it will never be quite as fashionable or useful as it wishes to be however much it tries. (There is a silk corbeau and a length of tarnished military braid lying in a discarded and rotten heap – he gives them as wide a berth as he is able although he'd swear they move, always seeking to sidle near and tangle about his feet.)

Through the centre of it all is a ribbon of blue, dark and bright, the stitched letters upon it spidery and golden. He does not want that reel to unwind or the bobbin to become lost because it is precious to him, more so than the others. He reaches out and tries to grab it, but his fingers snag a different length instead - one made of a rag-tag of many colours. The light changes and he struggles to read the words so that he might remonstrate with the owner of that particularly individual piece of lacing for getting in his way... He is not fast enough.

Sherlock Holmes blinks slowly, awareness awaking in clouded eyes, seeking to find what has roused him. Gliding towards him is a ragged creature with a disconcertingly piercing gaze; raindrops glinting silver in the wildness of her hair and the joss-smoke wreathing into curlicues and wings at her back. She looks like a fairy-queen born of city grime and London smog.

"Emmaline Lindhurst," he drawls. "How have you been, dear girl? Thought I saw your ribbon."

Her mouth is a thin line of displeasure, both at the state of him and his naming of her.

"Have you managed to stay out of Parkhouse?" he enquires solicitously.

"Have you?" she bites back.

He smiles uncertainly, unsure why out of all the things he could hallucinate he is hallucinating her, and why she looks so annoyed about it. Why would she be annoyed? Ah yes, because he is about to say – "You should go back to your family."

"Ain't got family."

"That's odd, I could have sworn the Lindhursts had a son, two daughters, a country estate, a sizable income, three dogs, two horses, a town house in Chelsea, a..."

"If they wanted me they shouldn't have sent me to Parkhouse." Her voice is cold, like broken mirrors and shattered trust. The asylum had been genteel, as such places go, but they'd dosed her on laudanum and she's spent two months shivering, throwing up and hallucinating. She'd been methodically sharpening a spoon in her more lucid moments, until a man calling himself 'Sheridan Hope' had arrived and taught her how to avoid or dispose of the medicines forced upon her. He'd also given her his waistcoat and socks as protection against the chill and – glory of glories – turned out to be a rorty split in lay with the Miltons. He and his had caused enough chaos at Parkhouse that she was able to disappear down to the Thames mud and away into the city.

It's not a debt he has ever acknowledged, nor is it one she's ever forgot.

"You're looking well."

She raises an eyebrow. "You look bleedin' awful."

"I like what you've done with your hair." He waves a hand at her. "Very... very..." Words dance beyond his grasp. "Sanguine," he settles at last.

She looks at him and continues to look at him. He begins to fancy that her eyes are lit from within by blue stars that have the power to transmit her thoughts across the aether, written in some strange and unknowable script that is filling his brain line upon line making it impossible to think clearly... She doesn't appear to be too happy about the situation either. But it must be rather uncomfortable to have blue stars in one's eyeballs – itchy no doubt... He scrubs at his eyes with the back of his hand, surreptitiously checking for star-seeds. His eyes don't feel like they contain stars, although when he presses upon them he is able to see the sparks of light that must be Emmy's thoughts – fascinating... He also sees a mourning band tied around the upper left sleeve of her coat, fashioned out of a gentleman's black silk cravat. He scowls, his thoughts colliding as past present and future skew. "Am I dead then?"

She follows his line of sight and her lips twist in a fit of acrasia. "Not wearin' it for you."

"Oh." Which meant either he isn't dead (but he is) or she doesn't care (Emmy always cares) or – "Who died?"

Her eyes narrow slightly into an unkind look. "I didn't think the Don Jack gave a shit anymore what happened in his city, after all, he's been gone three years, never even wrote..."

Her words mask pain, an abyss of grief she has yet to fully bridge. "Emmy..." He needs to know what has happened before her railing at him tips her off her narrow span of spider-silk control. "Emmy the bridge!" he mutters. "Please..."

She sighs. "Harry died. Last winter. Caught a chill – lodged in his lungs an' ate him up."

"My sympathies," he says, because somewhere in amongst the smoke part of him recognises loss is pain. He notes by the easing of her expression that it is the right thing to say. "I was dead at the time," he confides, wanting to make sure she knows – it seems important.

The stars behind her eyes flare and the lightning-blue script of her thoughts becomes jagged and bright with displeasure. Ah. The wrong thing to say. The stars bore into him and, "You're a fine piece of work, ain't you?" she tells him, somehow sounding both contemptuous and disappointed. He isn't used to disappointing people, it is a novel, wholly unpleasant sensation he vows to repeat as little as possible in the future.

A stray thought reminds him that he'll be dead by dawn. Ah good, not much time at all in which to disappoint anyone. He isn't an advocate of resolutions, they, like rules seem designed to be proved until broken, but if he does have them he likes resolutions he can keep. Which reminds him... With a supremely unsteady hand he fumbles towards his coat pocket and pulls out the dark cerulean bottle that rests there. The glass is narrow, faceted and ridged across alternate faces in the manner of poison vials and apothecary bottles.

Emmy's eyes widen, pupils swallowed whole in a sea of stormy blue. "Don't you fuckin' dare," she breathes.

He un-stoppers it, losing the cork somewhere.

"I'll knock out your bleedin' brains 'fore I watch you down that," she vows.

He gives her an oddly disarming look. "Would you?" he invites. "Much obliged."

Dry desperation is sparked to rage by the smallest ember of anger. She lunges forward, intent on slapping some sense into him and grabbing the bottle before he has a chance to recover or make good his stupidity. She gets as far as the slap, a ringing backhand across his cheek that snaps his head to the side and strikes a further note of pained confusion into his already dream-addled eyes. _"Bastard,"_ she accuses, trying to reach across him as he curls away from her, difficult to the last.

The sound of boots, heavy leather in smart step, marching along the corridor outside. Gentlemen may have the pace, but not the nailed heels. Dockers have the heel all right but not the pace: only the Law or the Army have both. She retreats into shadow, slipping down and back into the lee of a bunk, far from the spirit-lamp's eye.

Sensing his figment has left him, Holmes uncurls slightly and takes a swig from the bottle he still clasps. His cheek – across the orbital bone beneath his right eye - tingles. He hadn't previously been aware that hallucinations possessed such weighty hands... No matter. He relaxes once more against the cushions that shelter him and waits for the ceiling to turn into oblivion.

The door opens, the draught sending disruptive waves against the soft-curling smoke and causing the lamp flame to flicker. Holmes rolls his gaze heavily away from the ceiling; since it's not time for either lamp, brazier or pipe to be replenished he supposes it must be another dream come to visit him. Because has he not expressly forbidden all but Lung to come here? And his orders are followed, his wishes in the imperative hard to disobey however inconvenient – Watson has often commented upon it in his fanciful recounting of their adventures, so it must be true. Watson doesn't lie about such things, he's useless at prevaricating... Unless it's fiction, he lies quite entertainingly in fiction.

Is his inability to prevaricate only a fiction? Holmes suddenly cannot remember, his thoughts are being pasted over with a thousand pages of Watson's stories, falling thicker and faster, becoming a torrent – a typhoon – a waterfall for Holmes to drown in. And he did, didn't he? Dragged down to the depths, battered and broken and crushed against the pale rocks, lungs saturated past capacity with water (or is it words?) and so heavy that his corpse never rose again. His limbs feel heavy now and he can sense the weight of words (or is it water?) settling on top of him like six feet of earth beneath a headstone.

Time, like everything else, is fluid. He dreams of sweeter moments and a better place...

_Sunlight was falling lazily through the window, the slow golden variety that came in autumn towards the end of the day. He stopped playing and dropped his violin abruptly onto a cushion at the side of his chair but kept hold of the bow. "What are the chances that the next person we see will have an above average number of arms?"_

_Watson looked up, he hadn't been listening and took a moment to replay the question in his head. "What?"_

_Holmes flicked the bow through the air and pointed the tip at him, demanding an answer._

"_Nil, I would have thought, unless you know something I don't." He didn't put it beyond the realms of possibility that Holmes had engaged a case with the denizens of an Eastern freakshow including the Striped Tiger Man of Jaipur and Kali the Dancing Goddess of the Many Arms._

"_I know numerous things you don't." His jibe was out of boredom more than spite._

"_Well I know a lot of things you don't too."_

_He grinned lop-sidedly signalling he found that unlikely, although Watson's childishness amused him._

"_You are so full of yourself," he complained without rancour._

_Swish went the bow. "Answer the question." Flick-swish._

_The doctor sighed; he's sure that most people did not have these sorts of conversation. "Nil," he said._

"_Are you willing to bet?"_

_He rolled his eyes. "Yes." Of course he knew there was some flaw, some twist that meant the obvious answer was not the correct one, but there's nothing for it but to take the obvious answer as he was supposed to and wait for Holmes to explain. _

_The bow traced a triumphant figure of eight in the air. "You owe me dinner."_

_Of course he did. "Fine." He waited. No elucidation was forthcoming. "I find myself none the wiser," he prompted._

_The detective flashed up a smile, bright and with a hint of mockery in it. "Indeed, but you are remarkably better informed."_

_Watson laughed. "Holmes," he warned._

_He relented. "As a doctor you should be all too aware that many of the populace do not have two arms, having the misfortune to have lost one to disease, injury or a malformation of the body. But there are remarkably few individuals born with three. Therefore..."_

"_The average number of arms possessed by humanity as a whole is marginally less than two."_

"_One point nine eight seven, according to my calculation."_

_He nodded. "You know," he said, picking at the side of his thumb, "you could just say you wanted to go out for supper and it was my turn to pay."_

"_Don't be ridiculous."_

_He grinned. "Simpsons?"_

"_Wonderful."_

The light has changed, a shadow falling where none lay before, and it jars him towards lucidity again. There is a man standing in the room with him. He should perhaps wonder about that, but he feels pleasantly languid, gently stupefied...

_They were both stretched out on the floor like a couple of gypsies amidst a scattering of cushions and the wreckage of a staunchly appreciated meal, a half-drunk bottle of Claret between them._

_Watson drained his glass. "This is extremely pleasant. I could do this all day." He reached over and claimed the bottle, refilling both their glasses._

"_Mm, what's that charming colloquialism? 'Until the cows come home.'"_

_He shifted slightly to stop his leg stiffening but was feeling too ruthlessly indolent to move further. "And when they do I should tell the bovine fraternity to sod off and stop interrupting me."_

_His eyebrows tilted. "Do you find your life frequently interrupted by cows?"_

_The conversation had taken a turn for the whimsical. "Not frequently, no," Watson allowed._

_His smile was sly and sharply amused. "What about Lady Lawrence's ball?" On that occasion Watson had been bothered all night by a veritable herd of cows dressed in silk, frills and diamonds - and not stimulating line of conversation between them._

_A snort; Watson had been pestered and bored in equal measure but then as now he was too mannered to pass comment. _

_He acknowledged no such constraint. "It was lucky they didn't serve beef for dinner otherwise it would have been cannibalism," he muttered and was rewarded by the doctor's laughter._

But no, that can't be right, his stomach feels empty, grinding hollowly to itself. It does not feel like a late summer afternoon at Baker Street, too chilled, too damp, too dark - added to which there is a sensation like nausea and exhaustion twined tightly around him. But Watson is there, isn't he? He's always there.

_Waistcoat in disarray and hair far worse, h__e had collapsed onto the ottoman, limp as a wet rag and just as used up. A pause and then a sigh that was half-way to a growl. "Some days I find it exhausting living up to people's good opinion of me." Such a statement should have been facetious, should have contained bathos, but somehow it skirted both._

_A smart reply was on the tip of the doctor's tongue but he swallowed it; his eyebrow raised to the silence that followed. "Has it occurred to you that if people have a good opinion of you it's because you've already proved it?"_

_There was a grunt in answer, clear Holmsian short hand for 'don't be so bloody ridiculous, dear boy, people are idiots.'_

_A twist of the lips, not quite a smirk. "So if people are idiots, why do you pay the slightest mind to what they think in the first place?"_

_A low growl. "I don't."_

"_Patently," Watson badgered, "you do."_

_An irritated flick of wrist and finger which would have worked better if he was holding his bow. "I do not. When have I ever?"_

"_Just now, unless I'm very much mistaken."_

"_You are," it was as swift rejoinder with a dose of petulant acerbity._

"_Very well," he said breezily. "My task in life is to be frequently mistaken despite the fact I'm not, and your task in life is to disappoint those you encounter despite the fact you don't." He sighed, a loud and overly-theatrical gust of relief. "I'm so glad we have that sorted."_

_There was a mumble from the Ottoman which may or may not have been 'you're a bastard'._

"_I beg your pardon, what was that?"_

"_I hate you."_

"_Ah. Nothing new there then."_

_One eye, bright and dark as a blackbird on a winter's morning, opened and gave him a look._

_Watson read in its colour and shape a whole letter's worth of annoyed sniping and deep affection, muddled together in a way that no one else could possibly understand but he. "Quite," he said with amusement._

_Holmes, stretched out and dishevelled upon his cushions still looked like Hamlet, but Hamlet with a quite uncharacteristic smile._

Watson always did his best to chivvy him out of his moods, using every weapon at his disposal from wry humour to a swift kick. But there are some things that run deeper than ennui and the casual touch of the Noonday Demon. Some fissures which cannot be bridged, stains which prove indelible - Watson knew that, didn't he?

The detective twitches, trying to view events in their proper order; put the words chronologically, the hours alphabetically.

There are things he ought to speak of – a thousand bubbling thoughts – but one memory sits above them all like a maleficent Buddha, fat and tarnished and grinning. He wishes it would go away: he does not care for its expression, its sunken eyes, domed forehead, and its nasty superiority.

"I couldn't beat him," he confesses. The Buddha that is not Buddha tips its head in an oddly serpentine movement. "I followed him, chased every twist and turn, found every hint and tracked every crime. But it achieved little." His voice is bitter, he can feel it turning ashen in his mouth but he forces himself to speak on. "You always said I was brilliant... My brilliance was not enough."

"Sir?"

There is something wrong with the voice, or the word, but turn the shape of it round and round in his hands as he does he cannot slot its angles into a solution, so he discards it and ploughs on. "The files no longer fitted on the desk, you saw how they spilled down the shelf – so much paper, a record of every deed – but not one that could be pinned to him..." He is assaulted by the image of a child's party game – pin the tail on the donkey. He's blindfolded and spun round and round, reaching blindly to impale the shadow with a hatpin, stab the specimen _Summum Malum _to a board, and he laughs. There does not seem to be enough air: he wonders where it went as the laugh is strangled from him.

"There is a story, is there not?" It takes a moment for him to realise that the thought he can see turning and twisting upon itself in the air like a Jacob's ladder is not easily discerned by anyone else. The light it gives off – an antiqued gold turning copper – must render it too bright to read. "Ten righteous men," he explains. "For those ten, god will save the city." He smiles, sickly and thin, because the ladder is tangling itself, mocking him. "I used to have hopes that I was one such man... I shall not aspire to such vanity again." There is a hollowness yawning inside him and he lifts the bottle to his lips to fill it; a line of the tincture runs down his cheek and soaks into his collar as he swallows.

"I did it on purpose. Being a thorn in his side. Tried to snag and tangle him not because he would trip but because he would eventually have to draw a blade and cut me loose from his coat. Brawls and falling masonry and run-away cabs – I knew I had his attention. He came to visit me – no, I visited him – well, we met in the same locale." A hazy and knowing look because that statement was the tip of a very jagged iceberg that would make an epic telling. But that tale is an adventure – and adventures are for firesides and good humour and the Strand. They are not for here. Not for now.

"His hospitality was impeccable. Received a brandy and two cracked ribs; in exchange he received an adamant refusal to halt hostilities. _Case closed_." The smile is back, only this time it is like the grimace of a dying fox. "Had to get him away from his home-ground, it didn't matter where... I must have had a reason for Switzerland. Did I?"

Watson does not answer, stands as he has been standing, awkward and to attention but not canted to the right.

"Glad you leg's better old boy," he mutters, a thought tugging at the back of his mind but unable to struggle through the poppy-juice. "Where did I? – Switzerland – yes, Switzerland... Switzerland."

* * *

NOTES

Yen – from the kanji for opium

On the gander – looking for

Brighter hoke to play – better things to do

Ngong baht-paw hai – Cantonese: crazy nosey bitch c*nt

Hou sei la lei – Cantonese: drop dead, go to hell.

Hm ga tsan – Cantonese: a curse upon your whole family

Ribbons in Holmes' mind - plum velvet = Adler, hunter-green = Mrs Hudson, black silk = Mycroft, russet = Lestrade, silk corbeau = Moriarty, tarnished military braid = Moran, dark blue = Watson

Rorty split in lay with the Miltons - a dashing detective in league with the police

Summun malum – Latin: the supreme evil


	6. Chapter 6

_It had been a strange and beautiful few days. _

_There was a__ freedom to be found in knowing the end, in having made a decision and being determined to see it through. It would be poetic and false to say that his eyes were opened to the world, for the detective's eyes had always been open, his glory and curse to catalogue a thousand daily details all others in society missed. But it was accurate to say he had a heightened appreciation for his experiences during those last days, knowing he would never have them again, knowing that was all there was. He had given himself a death sentence, and as both executioner and the condemned he revelled in every second of his slow walk to the scaffold. _

_Watson noticed and was heartened by his enlivened character, attributed it to getting out of London and a change of scene after sleepless weeks fuelled by coffee, cocaine and inhuman reserves of stamina. It was a romantic notion, this miraculous rest-cure, and Holmes indulged it. He waxed poetic about the lay of the land, the fresh air and the panoramic views. He dropped anecdotes and harmless observations like a worthy scattering pennies for beggars and the doctor gathered up every one, smiling his appreciation as he did so; pleased that Holmes was in such good spirits. There was no deception - not in that. The air had never seared so cleanly in his lungs, the coffee (served sweet and milky) never tasted so fine nor the company been so perfect. It was paradise; and Holmes was both Adam and the Angel at the Gate unfurling forbidding wings and a blazing sword. _

_The message, when it came, signalled the beginning of the end._

_Watson's face clouded. "Damn," he uttered._

"_What is it?" Holmes asked lightly._

"_It's from Herr __Steiler__." He huffed, his eyes like the weather, his natural sense of duty and compassion darkening his sunny mood. "There is an English woman..."_

_Holmes raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth as if to make comment._

"_She has Consumption," Watson elaborated, still staring at the sheet of hotel notepaper and wishing it didn't exist. "She's asked for an English doctor."_

"_Quite right," Holmes muttered flippantly. "Foreigners are the most awful devils."_

_Watson's mouth skewed. "Holmes," he admonished gently._

_He looked up. "Well. Off you go." The amused sting that would normally accompany such a command was absent._

"_She's..."_

"_A lady of distinction."_

_He glanced at the name. "Yes," he admitted, and didn't bother to ask how Holmes knew. "She's..."_

"_Travelling with her companion; she refused to make a fuss but her companion is adamant."_

_He was no longer surprised. "Yes. Although..."_

"_Her condition is quite advanced and there is little to be done."_

"_She came..."_

"_For the air, but the tonic has proved ineffectual."_

"_I'll..."_

"_Have to leave immediately, but she'll likely either be reassured, dead or bored by tea time."_

"_I'll..."_

"_Not have time to make it back before the light fades, so will remain at the hotel until tomorrow morning." He was smiling, although he knew he ought not._

_It was testament to the company he was so used to keeping that the doctor didn't falter in the face of all this apparent omnipotence, simply nodded. "I'll meet..."_

"_Me at __Rosenlaui__ for a late breakfast tomorrow. Certainly."_

"_Do..."_

"_I mind? Not in the least old boy. These things happen."_

"_I'm..."_

"_Sorry- no doubt. But the view will still be here tomorrow."_

_The curl of his lips beneath his moustache was caught between annoyance and amusement. "D'you know..."_

"_That my perspicacity is utterly infuriating? Yes."_

_Watson looked at him, seeking the truth beyond the game._

_Holmes raised his hand, fingers lightly beneficent. "Really old boy. It's fine – think of it as a necessary delay and nothing more."_

_The expression was genuine as he nodded his thanks. "I'll see you tomorrow at __Rosenlaui__."_

_The hand, still raised, snagged for a moment on nothing at all as if the fingers wished to grasp his sleeve. "Tomorrow," Holmes agreed and smiled in return, hoping the flatness he felt in the gesture wasn't apparent._

_And like that Watson was gone, written out of the unfolding drama by Holmes' own duplicity. All his claims of being satisfied should he bag Moriarty were clues he couldn't help dropping, hating himself for doing so all the while. It wasn't a lie; ending the Professor would be the high-point of his career. He just wished it was a victory gained without such subterfuge. So he'd sipped his coffee, told his stories and mentioned what a worthy foe Moriarty was – the coup-de-grace of the great game to which he applied all his skills. Morbid curiosity needed to know if Watson would try to stop him or leave him to it, this final mad venture. He mistrusted his own moral compass and wanted more than anything to lean on Watson's, to gage his reaction, but was ultimately unable to put the question plainly, unwilling to burden anyone else – least of all Watson – with the knowledge. Which, in truth gave him all the answer he needed._

_He walked further up the path but couldn't stop himself from turning to catch a final glimpse of the straight-backed and stiff legged tweed-coated figure with a walking cane and sunlight in his hair as he moved briskly back down towards __Meiringen__. His mouth cramped into a bitter-sweet cant. "Thank you," he said softly. And after a pause, so soft as to be nearly silent, "I am sorry." Normally he would not apologise, not without a healthy dose of sarcasm or a slant to the words that leached much of their sincerity. Would too have added 'dear boy', 'mother hen' 'old chap' or some such similar petty endearment. The fact that he hadn't, would have troubled Watson considerably – had he heard. But some phrases are designed only to be spoken, never received, and such it was in this case. He turned once more to the valley and the majesty of the waterfall, noting how the water churned up the spray to diamonds at the bottom and rainbows halfway up. _

_It really was very beautiful. There were worse places to die._

_He perched upon an outcropping of rock, took out pen and daybook and wrote a letter, the nib scratching hastily across the page as fast as his thoughts could bid it. The missive was signed with a flourish as if he could imbue his name with all it lacked. He was folding it into his silver cigarette case when he heard the scrape of approaching footfalls (a sharp counterpoint to the water's roar) and saw the tall and dark-coated figure ascend the path towards him._

"_No entourage?" he enquired, pitching his voice to carry as he placed the case on the rocks behind him._

"_I could ask you the same question." The cultured tones teetered on the edge of snide. _

"_I tired of the company."_

_A silken smile. "The good doctor will be most hurt when he discovers you sent him on a wild goose chase."_

"_I find sometimes forgiveness is simpler to procure than permission." He stood, stretched, and gazed once more across the waterfall as if Moriarty posed no greater threat than a pigeon, a stray scrap of London come to dirty the landscape. "I believe congratulations are in order, by the way."_

_An eyebrow languidly raised itself above that of its twin._

"_Your gameplay was exquisite, your gambits refreshing and your strategy pure genius." He turned to face him. "Game, set and match to you."_

_There was a long span of stillness as the two Englishmen observed one another, one comfortably rumpled, his hair wild beneath his hat, the other impeccable and infinitely less at ease as he calculated, theorised, saw and indeed observed... Pale eyes widened showing a sliver of ire and surprise; one arm was flung out, derringer pistol snapping into his palm in an instant. But by then it was already too late. _

_Two shots were fired close together, one the crack of a smaller bullet, one the deeper retort of a heavier calibre. Both men spun like nine-pins, fallen shadow puppets against the silver-white water of __Reichenbach__. One shakily regained his feet moments later, lurched towards the crumpled figure on the path and noted with dispassionate approval the small bloody hole in his chest – no bigger than a shilling – and the look of hate on his features. With an effort the victor laboured to push the corpse off the footpath, almost following it as it bounced against the cliff-face and was swallowed by the churning thunder of the waters below. The gun was consigned to the same fate. _

_Dizzy, breathing heavily, Sherlock Holmes pressed his hand to his shoulder and the pain and crimson warmth that flowed from it. "For one well versed in trigonometry," he said hoarsely, "I expected you to be a better shot."_

_As if in answer to his accusation there was a whip-crack of sound and fragments of stone splintered and burst from the rocks further down the path. Moran. Holmes knew better than to stand and have an argument on the calculation of distance versus elevation with the finest game-hunter in India. He fled, a wounded tiger going to ground._


	7. Chapter 7

His voice is hazy, meandering like his thoughts. "The Egyptian god Ra had a daughter – Ma'at – placed her highest in the heavens so none could be above her. We gave her sword and scales, a coat of gold and a blindfold and dragged her down. Pity. We should have left her there. Her sword's too sharp – it cuts both ways, cuts the one who wields it..." He can see the wound, a chasm from hip to ribs that bleeds bloody shadows and little snakes. He'd press his hand against it to stem the flow but he doesn't want to touch the serpents, so he will let it drain him dry. "Mind the vipers," he advises absently.

The waters of oblivion are lapping at him again, floating him on a tide that will carry him out far from shore and drown him lovingly in their heavy embrace. But he has a little time yet.

"Moran knew, he'd seen it. He was up on a ledge on the other side of the rift. I think the water spoilt his aim. Saved by a thousand water droplets." This shouldn't be funny but he can feel his lips drawn wide in mirth at the image in his head – or outside of his head, he really can't tell any more. A curtain of precipitation serving as his saviour. It was like having his life saved by a puddle...

He's uncertain if he said that aloud; Watson's moustache looks troubled so perhaps he did. "I should have let him. Moran. Should have let him shoot me, puddles be damned." He can no longer feel his fingers; it occurs to him he may have less time than he thought.

"I ran. Fled scene and country and the country after that. Holed up in Vienna for a spell – not at my best," he admits conspiratorially, "but I was having a bit of trouble with my arm. It wouldn't stop dripping."

* * *

"_Why is it," the doctor complained, "that the only time you dress correctly is precisely the time you shouldn't? For godsake, how long did it take you to put your waistcoat on?"_

"_Your waistcoat, actually," Holmes corrected._

"_The bloody waistcoat!"_

"_It's not bloody." A glance at the lining as he gingerly extricated himself from it. "Mildly stained, I grant you, but not discernable from the outside..."_

"_Your sense isn't discernable from the outside," Watson bit back, unpacking lint, bandages, carbolic and needles from his bag. "Take your shirt off."_

"_The stitches are perfectly adequate, you don't..."_

"_You appear to be under the curious misapprehension that was a request. Shirt. Off."_

_The garment was removed and discarded so Watson could scowl at the bandage. Then that in its turn was unwound so Watson could scowl at the wound. "Tell me again why you have a hole in your shoulder the size of a half-pence."_

"_More thrupenny bit – ah!" Holmes stopped as the doctor's prying ministrations poked a little too hard. "Your bedside manner leaves much to be desired..." He hurried on before Watson could retaliate further. "Because it was necessary." There was the sharp scent of carbolic, and a curious sensation he could only assume was pain._

"_Necessary?" Clean bandage was being rewound over a lint dressing, snug and secure as a second skin._

"_To ensure Moriarty's death. Yes."_

_Watson was perched on the arm of the chair, pinching at the bridge of his nose - although, given the circumstances - he didn't look as troubled as he aught. "Why Switzerland, Holmes?" _

"_Because I will not break the laws of this country!" _

_Watson's chin raised at that. "You frequently do!"_

"_Not the ones that matter!" He retorted heatedly. "Besides, Lestrade and Gregson are getting to be quite promising..." He looked up as he spoke and caught Watson's expression; his friend's head was tipped to the side, his mouth struggling not to smile, forcing his moustache crooked. It was so easy to know exactly what he was thinking. _

_Labouchere's Amendment._

"_I've always thought Section Eleven spectacularly stupid," he admitted easily._

_The moustache and the lips beneath it crinkled further; he unfolded himself and stood, glancing towards the fireplace, the window, anywhere but Holmes, in a touching display of amused modesty. "Well, indeed, your disregard for that piece of legislation has upon occasion been made crystal clear."_

_Still shirtless, his feet set a course towards his pipe on the table but his path curved, deviating; he was drawn like a load-stone to true north. _

"_What did you say?" The doctor had been heading towards the cut-glass tumblers and the whisky decanter when he turned, bringing them both unexpectedly toe to toe, closer even, two pieces of magnetized iron arrested by the presence of the other._

"_I didn't."_

"_You did," he persisted quietly, thoughts of a drink forgotten. "You said 'true north'."_

_Holmes looked at him and there wasn't an inch of space between them. "Did I? I don't think I did," he murmured, his lips almost grazing the other man's jaw. The doctor's hand was lightly on his shoulder, he could feel the casual heat of it through the bandage and it felt as if there was no warmth in the world save what was transmitted to him through that touch._

_He reached an arm around Watson's back to draw him closer (there were still scant molecules of air and space between them and Holmes would banish them all, must banish them for what right have they to be next to this man's clothes, his skin, when he was not?) His heart was beating faster in his chest, harrying the blood through his veins in a rhythm he longed to fall in to. The song was too loud, the rhythm too fast, it had passed expectation and pleasure and was becoming desperate and pained..._

_His eyes snapped open, weak daylight all but blinding him. His heart was stuttering in his chest like a broken clock and his body was stiff, feeble and aching from all he'd put it through and the unforgiving floor he was lying upon. His cheek was pressed not against flesh but upon the stubble of a rug whose pattern was too rich – the colours made him ill. The unpleasant scent of bile reached his nostrils – it seemed the Persian rug had already claimed its revenge: he was flat upon the floor, cold and shaking beside a patch of vomit, his arm a blaze of newly waking agony amidst sodden dressing, his shirt crumpled and stuck to his back with sweat. _

_Without wishing to he saw the empty bottles, dark blue and brown geometric shapes in his field of bleached and wavering vision. He was alive – he must have miscalculated the dose. Or, since such simple mistakes are anathema to him, he must surmise he did not mean to kill himself after all - he was a traitor to his own cause. _

_The air left his chest in a tired hiss rushing past a dry throat and cracked lips. He would lie there, if he could, whilst the world turned on without him and whilst he waited for the pain and everything else to go away. But he could not. He was alive, and the Colonel was still on his trail. He has his pride, if nothing else, he couldn't allow himself to become the crowning trophy in Moran's swag bag. He rolled awkwardly to his side with a groan and struggled to his feet. The past was of no help to him now. He must move on._

_

* * *

_

"Always thought it idiocy to keep trying at something one clearly hasn't the skill for. Like trying to run though a wall... You used to say I had not just a knack but a positive flair for self destruction." His lips are numb, but they have probably curled into a sorry smile. "Seems I don't, not when it matters." He raises the bottle and takes another mouthful, almost missing. "Practice makes perfect."

The tide is rising higher, its eveniency is comforting, but it would be most bothersome to drown before he has finished his confession. "I went to Tibet – trying to cleanse my soul perhaps, if I have such a thing. Strange how something so evanescent something I have no evidence for should choke me so, should weigh so heavily. Like a coat of lead. Can one lose a soul? I think it may have died at Reichenbach and I kicked it over the edge with the Professor's corpse. _Requiéscant in pace."_

Talking is becoming more tiresome and his thoughts are slipping away from him if he doesn't pin them in place with a stern mental gaze and oh god it is getting so hard to keep his eyes open.

"I'm tired," he mutters, "but promises to go and miles to keep... I went, oh," he slurs airily, "to so many places. Maybe not as many as all that," he corrects himself. "I was free of the Colonel, Tibet proved a jaunt too far for him. Miles to go before I sleep..." He refocuses his gaze with an effort. "Received a telegram from Mycroft when the Adair business kicked up. I never could best him at hide-go-seek, ever so sharp eyed, brother mine. _Finish what you started: deal with Moran. _I've never been good at tidying up after myself, you know that Watson, untidy habits. Burning myself to nothing to solve the case but once it's done then so am I, loose ends are for the Yard, tea trays for Mrs Hudson, notes and the reports I leave to you."

He turns his head to see if he can catch the doctor's exasperated look; he can't, can't even quite make out the doctor, although he knows Watson is still there. "Mycroft knew what I was about before I even left London. He didn't dissuade me. He has always been one for the grander picture, he has all of the Empire within his gaze. If I wished to die for Queen and Country it wouldn't be a sacrifice better men had not made before me. Pessundation in a good cause."

He sighs feeling the water slip past his chin and settle in his lungs causing a last-ditch surge of adrenalin to snap him towards consciousness before he sinks. "Forgive me."

The straight-backed man standing on the other side of the table is startled, uncomfortable, as if all he'd learnt that night wasn't discomforting enough. "For what, sir?"

"Not for what I've done, there is no forgiveness for that. Forgive me for ever coming back – to you. The theatrics – the bookseller – I hadn't meant to show myself you see. I, I just wanted to see you one last time... It was unbearably selfish of me," he admits, his attention nailed to this chain of thought by will alone. "You should go. I don't want you here for this old boy, please leave."

"We need to get you home..."

"I have no home, not yet at any rate, but I'm striving to furnish myself with a neat little room, very snug. Pine is traditional, but I thought oak might be nice. No doubt my pocketbook will stretch..."

There is only one man in the world that the detective would have voiced all this to, and it is not the man standing before him. In some ways that is perhaps a kindness.

Even in this sorry, wasted state, it is hard not to be a little in awe of Holmes, whose mind works in ways easy to admire and impossible to fully comprehend. Clarky always did his best to pay attention to the man's methods on a case, but half the time they were so twisted up in his eccentricity it was hard to tell the two apart. Was his curious stare and rapping on the walls because he suspected there was a cubby hole hidden somewhere or did he just wish to know what note the wood made for inscrutable reasons of his own?

The Constable isn't a slow study, but Sherlock Holmes is a very oblique teacher.

He sighs, partly for the memories besetting him, but mostly for the most observant man in London who apparently has failed to observe the simplest truth sitting right under his nose. "Sir," he says quietly, wondering how it's fallen to him to point this out. The inspector – or best of all Watson – would be better. Holmes paid attention to them, and more importantly, actually listened to the doctor. He sighs again. Beggars can't be choosers.

"Sir, meaning no disrespect, but I think there are some things you've missed."

The brow furrows, the eyes narrow at the ceiling, a poor approximation of his usual magnesium-bright scorn.

"I think you're forgetting the corpses."

One dark brow shoots up like a startled crow, and the eyes flit uneasily left and right as if the mislaid cadavers might be beneath the chaise or propped in a corner by the curtain.

"You found them yourself a time or two, sir," Clarky continues quietly. "Moriarty and Moran between them had quite a flare for it; back in '89 they near doubled the mortuary lists."

On the chaise, the man's shoulders un-tense and his head tilts to the side. He has read those lists. He knows of those corpses. Everything is in its place, as it should be.

"But what you don't know anything of, if you'll pardon my sayin' sir, is of those left behind. Murder's never about just the one who got killed sir." There is a reproof hiding in the constable's voice, for all that he tries to exorcise it. If Sherlock Holmes spent his time playing nurse-maid to all the bereaved surrounding the cases he worked then he'd never have time to work a damn case in the first place. If he had a body as attuned to emotion as his mind was to logic then he wouldn't be the smartest man in London. (Second smartest, Clarky had heard him claim. But the Yarder didn't know of anyone else wearing that crown so put it down to a rare quirk of humility.)

For Clarky, the point of the job was justice and decency – two ideals he'd elevated in his mind to deific proportions. The long hours, the hard slog, the hours walking the streets and writing reports late into the night; the cold dinner and the weary frown waiting for him at home... All of these he endured in the hope – the belief – that it gave justice and decency the upper hand.

Sherlock Holmes did not do what he did out of justice or decency – if he had he would have joined the Yard. He did it (as far as Clarky could gather from all he'd seen and Lestrade's occasional rants on the subject) for the puzzle and for the pride of it all. He was a Master Horologist who treated London – perhaps the Empire – as a grand and intricate pocket watch in whose smooth running he took a keen interest, if for no other reason than it was there, and so was he, and to let it run down or keep incorrect time in his company was a poor reflection on his skill.

(On his brighter, kinder, days – of which the constable had many – he admitted he did Holmes a disservice, and the man likely did all he did in the name of Justice too. Simply a slightly stranger and less orderly cousin to Clarky's own paragon.)

But whether it was Justice or Pride, it had always been abundantly clear the watchmaker had no time for the mangled but still-functioning cogs of the shattered lives left behind. If they were not clogging up the gears, if the watch still ran, it was not within his remit and certainly far beyond his concern.

"I've had my fair share of giving the news sir. Passing on condolences and such. Watching as some poor bastard's missus makes the tea, four littl'uns running underfoot. Watching as she struggles t'stay tough as nails, but I can see in her eyes she's fragile as bone-china sir, and's got no notion of how she'll cope with no man, no money, and the littl'uns needing t'be fed. Sir." There is emotion in his eyes but it isn't easy to categorise, caught as it is somehow between pity and irritation. "You never saw none of that, seeing as how you stop taking note when the case has been solved. But I do – we do at the Yard – we have to. I never minded seeing the corpses so much m'self, sir. It was always the families after I found hard."

He stares at the man on the chaise, the man with his sloppy and infuriating habits but brilliant deductions, with his wild hair and unfocused eyes, and hopes – prays – that he is making an impression despite the opium smoke.

It's hard to tell.

In truth Holmes looks puzzled – as if he'd known he was likely to be confused at some point but he hadn't expected it to happen so quickly. What's quizzing him is how Watson turned out not to be Watson at all, but Constable Clark. To be honest he is uncertain which of them is real – if either – and at what point during his stumbling confession the switch took place. He ought to be worried that he has told such a tale to the policeman (supposing charitably that it _is_ the policeman and not a hat stand or somesuch) but he cannot, in just the same way that one lying at the bottom of a lake cannot bring themselves to care overmuch that it is raining.

Clarky doesn't sigh a third time, although he's fuelled his lungs to do so. He shakes his head instead, a small gesture which speaks eloquently of all his discomfiture with the whole situation. If Lestrade knew what he was about to say, he wouldn't just pull him up for double time - he'd have his guts as a bloody neck-tie.

His voice is steady when he puts breath to it, which surprises him, even if the one who ought to be surprised is too far gone to note it. "As a man of the Yard I can't condone what you've done, not a bit of it sir." He tries desperately not to fidget. He should not be saying this aloud: as a policeman he searches always for the truth, but as someone with more than half a brain he knows some truths are dangerous and better left unsaid.

Plainly put: "As a man, with a wife and a son, who knows what it does to a family when someone's murdered... Well..." He hasn't said the words yet but his tone and attitude already declare him guilty – and he is. The last of it comes out not quite in a rush but almost and with a flippancy he can't help. For the love of Christ – Sherlock Holmes may find it easy to admit to murder when half out of his skull on opium, but Clarky (although head-spun) is sober – and he can see why the yen or a touch of Dutch courage would be a boon. "Let's just say there have been less corpses troubling us since Moriarty took that little jaunt to Switzerland and I'm very grateful to you for that." He stops speaking, his words crashing into each other as if they braked too soon to avoid an interruption.

He glances down at the man, but despite the many clever remarks which should have been forthcoming, none emerge. That, for reasons he can't quite put his finger on, worries the Constable. Worries him considerably in fact. "Now sir," he says in his best let's-be-having-you tone, drawing himself up boxwood-straight. "What d'you say to coming back to Baker Street, eh?" He's aware he's being condescending – also that he's doing it on purpose – trying to goad that imperious wit into taking a swipe back at him for his cheek.

No wit, nor reaction of any kind occurs.

For not the first time that evening Clarky wonders if he is as out of his depth as he fears – or is in fact far further. A sincere token of unease bends his brows and tightens the muscles of his face.

Having Lestrade as a superior means he's quite good at arguments, when he has to be. Arguments of the grimy and grittier sort where winning means the added reward of a verbal cuff round the ear and more paperwork. It's hard to have an argument, he is finding - or even to start one - with someone who remains persistently silent.

"Mr Holmes, sir?" he tries again. "It don't do to have one such as yourself wallowing here." He lifts a hand awkwardly to smooth the neat parting of his hair, knowing full well it is a nervous gesture and nothing more. Damn it – even in real life there is a appropriate dramatization of events. There's been a confession, he's given absolution as best he can, now there is a conclusion – an exit. (Followed, one can only hope, by resolution provided by Watson – because really, the detective could not haunt London in his current state.) Reminded of his earlier thoughts of horologists and pocket watches, Clarky blurts out, "London needs you!" as if that is the magic phrase all earlier argument had been lacking.

In response Holmes mutters something which sounds suspiciously foreign ('_fichu portemanteau, mon dieu,') _raises an unsteady hand which clasps a dark bottle in a break-neck-vice, and swigs messily from it, most of the liquid escaping his numb and blue-tinged lips.

* * *

NOTES

Labouchere's Amendment - Also known as Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, made 'gross indecency' a crime in the UK. No definition of 'gross indecency' was given; the law was used to prosecute male homosexuals when actual sexual activity (which would count as assault) couldn't be proven.

Requiéscant in pace – Latin: may they rest in peace

Pessundation – this may or may not be a word. Pessundate is a verb meaning to cast down or ruin.

Fichu portemanteau, mon dieu – French: damned hatstand, my god...


	8. Chapter 8

In her corner, Emmy hugs the shadows, keeping low. Christ have mercy, she thought the Ketch'd have more brain than this. Letting the Don Jack talk, all the while as he slips further and further away. She'd stand up and give the idiot what for but she doesn't want to be recognised. He'd seen her at Parkhouse when the Jack was there; such remembrances could make her life difficult. Damn do-gooders always thinking they know what's best for her, unable to understand that for all its squalor the Rookery is the place she chose over a family too embarrassed to mention her. A family who would rather lock her away than have her taint their name.

She battles with herself, biting her lip as she struggles to see the possible outcomes and the likelihood of each. There are six ways this could play out without the _deus ex machina_ of divine intervention. In three of them he's already dead. In the remaining three his chance of survival is linked inexorably with who takes action and when. In only one is his survival mostly assured.

She bites her lip harder; if this causes her trouble – which it will, it always does - then she'll kick it all to his door – but at least he'll be alive for her to shout at.

There is a hiss, a feral noise such as a cat might make, and a pinched pale face surrounded by rat-tails of blood-red hair looms out of the darkness, darting forward to snatch the bottle from the detective's hand. She ignores his feeble murmurs of protest and glares at the constable. "Are you blind you can't see?" she scolds. "He's killin' himself."

Clarky resists the urge to rub at his eyes and confirm they aren't playing tricks on him; the honey'd poppy fumes are making him feel somewhat drunk. He stares at her stupidly for a moment, his mind struggling to order itself after the shock of the girl's appearance and revelation.

"Step short - get 'im out of here, f'the love o'god."

"How long have you..."

Damn Ketches and their stupid questions. She slaps the detective's hand as he reaches for the blue bottle, her accusing glare never leaving the constable. "He needs his Crow – I sent word but..."

"Crow?"

"His bloody Crow – the sawbones with the limp..." Mentally she changes gear – where'd he been holed up he couldn't understand a touch of cant? "The doctor. Watson."

Holmes flinches at the name and reaches again, fingers hooked and insistent.

She gives him a vicious look and tips the bottle so the contents pours onto the floor, splashing against the hem of her skirts. "Shut it," she snaps at his complaint. "I'll give you what for when you ain't lushed!" There is annoyance in her tone but an absence of true spite.

"Athanasian _bitch!"_ That on the other hand is nothing but spite.

Her eyes harden at the insult.

"Little bleached-mort blowsabella..."

She huffs out a short breath, determined not to lose her temper, but unable to keep her words free of sarcasm. "Real sharp voker, well done. When you ain't glock an' coopered, I'll tell you what you said," she warns. "It'll kick your hykey rotten."

He hadn't finished, has in fact still been slurring invectives as she speaks. "Dirty twist Tom-puzzle in a bunter's benjy," he rasps unpleasantly. "On the mag n' pull for a quid. Slum toffer, macing the lot, put the down on you, wench, raise beef t'that an..."

"An' tellin' you're drake to a mallard would put you in Chancery an' all," she says blandly, "ain't we both content? Quit mouthin'..."

"Judas," he snarls. _"Judas bitch!"_

"At least he kept good company," she says quietly.

His head jerks back against the pillows and his eyes show hurt bemusement. There is a hidden sting in her words, more painful than the earlier bruising of his cheek – perhaps because his mind is dulled and the true bite of her words unfurl with the slowness of a deliberate knife-cut and not the swift jab of a strike. Her words implied an acceptance – almost an insouciance of his slur. But beneath that acceptance lay an elevation of himself to the status of fellow disciple or – even worse – a Christ figure. He frowns, momentarily uncertain whether he is in the process of embracing death or rising from it. Both states were equally hazy and martyrdom he recalls, hurts.

She rounds on the constable, her expression still keeping its twist of displeasure. "Gimmie a lick o' card an' ya lead," she demands, holding her hand out.

Clarky takes an instant to untangle her words and divine their true meaning – she's after his notebook. "Miss..."

"Only need a leaf of it," she explains impatiently. "Give."

He obliges, taking out notebook and pencil and turning it to a fresh page before handing it over. She crouches at the low table, licks the tip of the lead and starts to write. Clarky peers to catch the words that flow across the page with a grace that surprises him – he hadn't expected her to know her letters and certainly not with such precise confidence.

She hunches a little. "Leave off," she admonishes as she scratches out her list. "Ain't for you." She finishes, tears out the page and returns both book and pencil to him, folding the scrap into the back of one of her mismatched gloves. She rises, and looks critically at her charge, lying supine and griseous amidst the cushions.

She didn't like his chances. The part of her that notices things (everything) - that counts seconds and floorboards, calculates cobblestones and pennies, lists scent and sensation until she wants to scream just to drown it out - has been busy. (The smaller bit of her, the lock box at the back of her head that withstood the cracksmith of her madness, tells her calmly that she'll pay for this knowledge, pay in fits and tears and delusion for three days straight and Charlie will probably have to stash her in the cupboard...) He'd been here for five hours – or more importantly three pipes and six mouthfuls of laudanum. She's been here for an hour and a half. It takes half an hour to get to Gloucester Place half that again if she's missed her guess and the Crow was at Baker Street. (But why would he be? Didn't sound much like the Jack had hooked back up with him. Love-a-mercy...) If Charlie had caught a cab – he has tin and a glib tongue, he should have done it – and had brought the Crow, they both should be here by now. What the hell was keeping them?

The Jack's more than half gone, his lips and nails are blue; she can't wait any more. "Pick 'im up," she tells the constable.

"Miss, I..."

"I ain't bleedin' carryin' 'im!" she snaps.

He looks at her, and she reads a sort of hopelessness in his eyes as he tries to find the correct way to behave, wanting what is best, but having no reason to accept further orders from some chit in rags who'd come from nowhere and snarled at everyone.

"Cool at 'im!" she demands desperately, pointing. "Open y'bloody lights!"

Clarky looks down at the man lying on the chaise and in that moment it is as if her command sharpens his sight, like a telescope adjusted to focus. He had been seeing Sherlock Holmes; a genius, a ghost, an iconoclast of irritation and infallibility who would pay any price in the name of justice. He'd been blinding himself with the legend. Now he sees the man. A man worn thin and cinerious with dark shadows at his back; a man poisoned with opium and self-hate, a Lazarus who wished he'd stayed dead.

The realisation is like a punch in the gut, forcing the air from his chest and making him dizzy and afraid.

"He needs the Crow – his blood's slowin' – we need t'get 'im cared for. Pick 'im up."

The constable nods and does as he's bid, stooping to gather up the semi-conscious detective and heft him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. Emmy snatches up the Don Jack's discarded coat and hat and – for reasons of her own - the ivory opium box, before leading the way out of the den.

The air outside bites cold and damp, coils of river-mist and coal-smoke curling through the rain; harsh, but cleaner than the infected miasma of the poppy-house. "Gotta leg it t'the junction for a cab. Keep y'head down an' keep up..." She sets off at a brisk pace, trusting that Clarky's longer legs can match hers despite his burden. She doesn't want to be out in the cold and rain, doesn't want to be towing a Ketch through territory not her own. But most of all she doesn't want Sherlock Holmes to swap his milltag for a shroud.

A broad shadow looms out of Colt's Cut into her path, one hand low ready to knock her off balance, the other hand masked and hefting a billyclub.

Cat-quick she hops to the left and back, avoiding his gambit. "Fainlights!" she calls. To say thieves never steal from their own would be a lie, but it isn't a habit they indulge in much as it frequently leads to low profits and sharp retaliation of the shiv-in-the-ribs variety.

The shadow pauses.

She silently prays enough of Clarky's glim and brass is hidden by the Jack's body, and lets her madness put words in her mouth. "Ay cove - get 'ere fadded wi'th' ikey over Chapel 'fore darkman's done. Rook'll string me guts if I turn honest!" She grins, tipping him a wink. "Gotta be on the fly - dog's well green but we've a rum lay. Cokum ends swell, Bill Abnay, I'll drop you a deaner o'jenny for bein' right bencull." She gives him an odd salute as if the matter's settled and she doesn't require his permission to leave with her head unbeaten.

It is of course natural in the face of such easy confidence that he gives it. "Bone and benneh," the shadow growls in acknowledgement and retreats.

Emmy's hands are shaking. She doesn't know how she knew it was Abnay, no doubt tomorrow her mind will unsnarl its reasoning in nonsensical flashes that make her sick. It's getting harder to concentrate, to hold it all together, not to get distracted (Three Colt Street: fifth of a mile long, fourteen gin mills, four flashkens, two dens, sixteen people on foot, seven whores loitering, one body decomposing, five cats, two dogs (one rabid), nineteen feet to the corner of Commercial...) Concentrate!

"Emmy!" the shout knifes from the dark like a harpoon, spearing her fragmenting attention and drawing it in.

Thank Christ and St Giles for small mercies.

The tall and narrow-shouldered figure of Charlie pelts towards her out of the rain, boots striking hard on the cobbles. "He's here. Went t'Marylebone first, was what took so long, thought he'd be there. C'mon!"

She grabs his hand, needing the stability of his presence, needing to clasp something real. She casts a glance behind her to check the Ketch is still in her wake and hurries, putting even Charlie's longer legs to work. "You tell 'im?"

"That it was yen poisonin'? Aye."

"You tell 'im who it was?"

Charlie scowls beneath his cap. "He didn't ask."

Emmy isn't sure whether she wants to laugh or cry. She hadn't counted on the Crow's good nature and adherence to duty to roll that far. He'd been pulled from his house – maybe even his bed – told he was needed and to hurry – and he hadn't asked for whom he took the trouble.

She'd assumed that if the Don Jack was in London than the one who would know of it first was Watson. But the confession she had heard showed the crafty bastard hadn't let on. He'd snuck around finishing his business with the Head Hunter and the Yard leaving no one else any the wiser. The Crow was about to get the shock of his life...

She makes an incoherent noise of hissed vexation. "He don't know, Charlie!"

He would have stopped as the realisation jolted him but Emmy is pulling him ever onwards. "Huh. Well," he says practically as he spies the carriage ahead of them, "He'll find out soon enough."

"My eye," Emmy swears at the pavement.

Charlie unlatches his hand from hers and sprints the last few yards to the carriage door, flinging it open. "We got 'im," he tells the man inside. "He's here." Then he steps back, ready to help the Ketch lift their delivery in.

The doctor leans out of the carriage, squinting through the fog and drizzle to see a young woman of the streets hurry up followed by a policeman with a body hefted over his shoulder. The woman rushes towards him, one hand on the carriage, her countenance stern, her eyes frantic. "Here," she says, pressing something into his hand. "Keep it safe – if he looks t'be goin' you'll need it t'call 'im back."

He frowns at the scrap of paper and pockets it – it is a distraction and he needs none if he has a patient to tend to. The young woman throws a bundle of hat and coat she was carrying into the hackney, not caring where they land, and then allows the policeman and the young man room to dispose of their burden.

"Clarky?"

The Constable is unusually grim faced, but beneath that something like pity or apology is writ in the tilt of his features. "Doctor," he acknowledges with strained politeness as if there is a great deal more he wishes to say but is all too aware he's run out of time.

Watson retreats to the far corner of the carriage: Clarky enters awkwardly clasping an unconscious man by the shoulders as the two Street Arabs grasp hold of his feet and all three strive to get the body safely stowed. There is little light in the carriage, illumination comes weakly from a streetlamp outside St Anne's churchyard. Something pricks at the back of the doctor's mind as he opens his bag and shakes out the blanket he brought with him, a familiarity he can't place. "Put him up on the seat, here, across me," he orders. The next moment he has his arms full of the body and is concentrating solely on bracing himself comfortably so he can keep hold of his patient without spilling him onto the floor. "Clarky..."

"Sir?" The policeman is still in the confines of the carriage and has made no move to leave – a clue in itself if Watson had the attention to spare, which he doesn't.

"Lay the blanket over him. I need you to assist me until I reach my surgery..."

The door of the carriage is slammed shut and the young unfortunate calls out clearly to the cabby, "Upper Baker Street. Two-two-one. Shift y'self!"

"Hey-up!" the cabby hollers, flicking the reigns against the horses' rumps and causing the conveyance to lurch into motion.

"My surgery..." the doctor protests, a strange feeling of twined hope and dread taking root in his stomach despite his confusion.

"Baker Street, sir," Clarky corrects firmly.

Watson's heart has began to beat an uncomfortable rhythm of double-time, the hammer of it loud in his ears. With a Herculean effort, he drags his eyes away from the Constable's face and to that of the man he holds across his lap. He doesn't want to look, because he knows who he wishes to see, just as he knows that is impossible and the truth – the disappointment – will be like having his heart shattered all over again.

The hackney rattles apace down the streets heading ever north-west to Marylebone, the roads widening and the streetlamps becoming more frequent as they leave the bounds of the Rookery. It is in the opalescent and ever-flickering stutters of light cast by each lamp passed that Watson beholds the man's face. The cheekbones are a little too pronounced, the jaw stubbled, the eyes long-lashed and sunken in shadow beneath coal-black brows and a shock of snarled black hair, silvered at the temples. It is a face older and worn with greater hardship than he remembers, but it is still unmistakably that of Sherlock Holmes.

He opens his mouth but no sound emerges. He doesn't believe in miracles. There was a time he had hoped, had waited for his friend to appear at his door: battered hat at an angle too avant-garde to be fashionable, dark eyes scintillating with humour and the thrill of some new mystery to be solved. But that time had passed long since. He blinks, but the broken vision before him doesn't fade or change; he was not mistaken.

Holmes.

He feels narrow channels of warmth run down his cheeks and the sting of salt in his eyes. Stupid infuriating maddening idiot – it has been three years! With that the racing of his heart is arrested by a cold wash of fear from his gut that drowns out adrenaline and shock entirely. Holmes was back from the dead, but he'd overdosed on opium and if he wasn't cared for he wouldn't be back for very long.

Watson uses practice and professionalism to put steel in his nerve and stop him from falling apart completely. He taps at the man's cheek, lightly at first and then harder. "Holmes? Holmes! Wake up. It's extremely dangerous for you to sleep. Damn it, wake up man!" There is no reaction. "How long's he been like this?"

"Not long sir. He was awake 'til just before we left – five minutes maybe ten at the most."

Watson's mouth turns down at the edges grimly. He prises open one of Holmes' eyelids and leans down, waiting for the next streetlamp to illuminate iris and pupil. A split-second of light shows what he feared: the iris reflects wide and huge, the melanic colour of rich tobacco and treacle. The pupil is nothing more than the tiniest fleck of black, withered and turned inwards to dreams and catatonia. Next he presses his thumb gently against the bruise-coloured lips and notes their colour does not abate. He reaches two fingers inside Holmes' collar and feels on the left of his neck for a pulse. The beat of blood beneath his fingertips is caprizant, an uncertain stutter. Lastly he slips his palm under the open waistcoat and lays it against the sternum; Holmes is breathing, but it's slow and shallow as if his lungs are too tired to fill themselves with air and so labour at quarter capacity.

This was not good.

He reaches across and unbuttons the top tier of the shirt, his brows pinched together in worry. He lays his palm against Holmes' chest again, first against the breastbone, next to the lower right side of the ribs: the skin beneath his palm is cold and clammy. Leaving his right hand as it is he reaches his left into his bag without looking, fingers knowing well their business and able to find his stethoscope without visual aid. Hooking the earpieces in he holds the stem of the apparatus against Holmes' flesh, listening intently. It is both as he expected and as he feared: fluid is starting to build in the lungs. There isn't much, not yet, but the fact it's there at all bodes ill; a surfeit of opiates often leads to a pulmonary edema – a state both dangerous and potentially fatal. He unhooks the stethoscope and drops it back into his bag, his eyes set on the man lain in his lap all the while.

Clarky has watched the proceedings in anxious silence. "Will he be all right, sir?"

Watson swallows, trying to remember how to speak because the world had been spinning so fast on its axis he feels the force of it may well have struck him dumb. He swallows again, reluctant to meet the Constable's gaze; some irrational part of him believing that if he stops looking at Holmes even for a moment, he may disappear or die or prove to have been a nightmare after all.

"I don't know. If we can rouse him enough and get some charcoal into him I believe he'll – he'll..." He finds he can't say 'live' or any euphemism pertaining to the same because that is an admittance there's a real and gaping possibility he may die. Should unconsciousness become a coma then he will not wake up. And should the workings of his lungs become any more hampered or fluid-filled then he will suffocate. Watson knows these things as medical fact, but he doesn't wish to give them any more credence in this situation than he has to.

"We'll be there soon sir," Clarky offers, a sop of consolation but one that they both need to hear; as if getting Holmes safely stowed in Baker Street will prove his salvation.

Watson nods, not trusting himself to speak, and continues to watch, keeping vigil over his all too mortal ghost.

* * *

NOTES

Step short – hurry up

Lushed – intoxicated

Athanasian bitch – bitch was the worst insult one could level at a lady, worse than whore. An 'athanasian wench' was a slut who was up for anything. So the two together are likely the most insulting thing Holmes could have said.

Bleached-mort blowsabella – attractive yet ill-presented young woman, a slattern.

Voker – thieves' cant, slang.

Glock and coopered – crazed and worn out, useless.

Hykey - pride

Dirty twist Tom-puzzle in a bunter's benjy – a nasty slut, a lesbian in a beggar-whore's clothes

On the mag n' pull for a quid – screwing everybody over (literally and figuratively) for a little money.

Slum toffer – a rich person of good family 'slumming it'.

Macing the lot – Fooling everybody

Put the down on you, raise beef t'that – Rouse everyone's suspicions, tell everybody

Drake to a mallard - homosexual

Put you in Chancery – put in an awkward and undesirable position

Tin - money

Cool at him – look at him

Milltag - shirt

Fainlights – Peace, a truce.

Glim and brass – insignia on a uniform

Cove – a man

Fadded wi'th' ikey over Chapel 'fore darkman's done – to store something safely with a Jewish receiver of stolen goods in Whitechapel before dawn.

Honest - idle

On the fly – on the move

Dog's well green – my associate's inexperienced

A rum lay – an inspired plan

Cokum ends swell – job goes to plan

I'll drop you a deaner o'jenny for bein' right bencull – I'll give you money for a drink for being a good mate.

Bone and benneh – all good, satisfactory.

My eye – popular curse


	9. Chapter 9

Awareness comes to him in snatches, like air to a drowning man, with thick cloying swathes of darkness in between. There are voices, words spoken low or called as desperate imperatives; it makes no odds, both are equally incomprehensible to him.

He slips away further; only to have a semblance of consciousness forced unpleasantly upon him: his head is tilted back and something like an iron pipe is trying to destroy his throat from the inside. He struggles to move, to close his mouth: his teeth jar and the thing in his throat feels like it is trying to tear its way out. A hand holds his jaw and something is poured down into his stomach. He coughs as the torturous pipe is pulled from his throat and scant seconds later he is retching up what tastes like bile and ashes.

There are words in his head and he has no clue where they've come from, but they fit his current punishment very well.

_For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth. My heart is smitten and withered like grass... My bones cleave to my skin for I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping… My days are like a shadow that declineth..._

He wished they'd decline faster.

Darkness descends again and he is infinitely grateful. Its mercy is slim however; it bestows cold upon him, a frigidness set in his limbs and in his lungs like ice, and then spits him back into the waking world without ceremony.

He feels like a sycamore leaf, spinning in lazy circles and falling, falling forever downwards. Time stretches and snaps unpleasantly. His mouth is full of something that tastes dark and grainy as if someone had brewed stout from coal.

For a few infinite moments he ponders the possibility of a drink distilled from coal, cheap and rough no doubt, and all the mouths daily oiled with gin would be stained with an obsidian sheen instead, making teeth look like pieces of carved jet. The upper classes would drink it at funerals to show how the colour of their grief traversed the spectrum past the anger of red, the confusion of orange, the shock of yellow and adriftness of green, the unhappiness of blue and the dejection of indigo (violet – violet is a lie, Newton never saw it but thought six an insignificant number for the weighty task of pillaring the fragments of light {and how heavy they must be!}) to the smothering anguish of black.

He should ask what hue was worn at his funeral (orange, like the monks at Palkhor in Shigatse – they must have known he was dead...) He opens his mouth to enquire and discovers he is choking on liquid coal. Perhaps his heart is a cinder and has burst in his chest; it feels like it might have. He is chilled, hollowed out, there is pain hovering above him like a bird of prey, diving down at intervals to plunge its beak into him and tear out gory globbets of flesh. This must be Hades.

He chokes: swallowing black bile and coughing it out in equal measure but more is always in his mouth. He bears his torment for as many years as he is able, until at last he succeeds in unpicking his soul from the carcass of his body (who sewed it there with such neat stitches? The Almighty must be a very deft seamsmistress) and drags himself away from it in disgust.

His triumph is short-lived. The birds of prey descend with a scream loud enough to shake the sky, stabbing his soul back into its corpse, bringing true darkness and an uneasy peace in their wake.

* * *

"You shouldn't be here," he slurs.

Watson isn't supposed to be dead and certainly isn't supposed to be in hell. He thinks it most unjust that hell should have the appearance of his old rooms, a place so familiar to him and so longed for. As he watches the walls began to bow, the structure of the room warping like glass blown on the end of a metal rod, stretching and fragmenting into non-Euclidean shapes.

_Yes,_ he thinks, uncertain whether to be relieved or terrified. _That's more like it._

"G-go away." It is a weak growl, forced out between sodden breathes and bouts of coughing and retching that follow so fast on one another it is impossible to tell whether it's his stomach or lungs that his body is trying to purge.

"Lie still," Watson commands for the thousandth time, wondering whether to risk forcing him to drink more of the activated charcoal and whether to pour it down his throat with or without the aid of a feeding funnel. "Stay on your side – Holmes! – lie still!" His words have no effect, as they've had none for the past hour of delirium. He knows the detective hears him, would be tempted to say Holmes didn't know who he was (neither the doctor nor himself) but that would be a falsehood, and a foolish one at that.

When they open and gaze upon him the eyes show recognition, and a sorrow bordering on hate. Holmes struggles onto his back and tries to push himself away.

"For god's sake!" He's at the end of his tether, has been so from the start. There are only so many times he can pull the detective back onto his side, pin him as he struggles through his dreams and try to ensure he doesn't choke on the fluid his body is expelling.

Holmes makes a keening noise and thrashes harder, not wanting to be touched, not wanting his nightmares to wear Watson's face.

"Damn you, lie still!"

He shudders and his body seems to collapse into itself, all fight evaporating in an instant, leaving him corpse-hued and as animate, his eyes half-lidded and glassy.

The doctor watches, relief ebbing as he realises this is it – Sherlock Holmes, the man who's unflinchingly stepped up to the mark against brawlers, murderers and criminals, has just given up.

He closes his eyes and utters a very quiet and heartfelt, _"Fuck."_ He sits down, legs and hands shaking: this has just ceased to be an emergency and become a death-watch. He masks his face in his hands.

In the midst of his anguish there is a memory: a scrap of paper pressed into his hand – _you'll need this to call him back._ He reaches for his jacket, tossed on the floor as he entered – and pulls the paper from his pocket. He has already had one miracle tonight, he knows it is impossible to expect another. He rubs a hand across his moustache as he scans the list, then he clears his throat and starts to read.

"Sir Benjamin Marlowe, George Ellis, James Langton, Anne Mayhew and daughter, Henry Swift, Dr Tobias Fairchilde, Charlotte Royce, the Griffiths brothers, Alice Mackintosh... Dr John Watson." He looks to see what effect his words have had, and seeing none he does the only thing he can do. He steadies his voice and reads the list again.

"Sir Benjamin Marlowe, George Ellis, James Langton..." He reads it until he no longer needs the list, can recite it from memory as if it is a mantra that keeps Holmes breathing. "Anne Mayhew and daughter, Henry Swift, Dr Tobias Fairchilde, Charlotte Royce..." He recites it until the names are seared in his mind, his throat is dry and the dawn outside is breaking. "The Griffiths brothers, Alice Mackintosh... Dr John Watson."

And then he says it again.

* * *

Watson sinks into the chair, his eyes dull with worry. He reaches out and lays a hand on Holmes' brow, as if he could smooth away the drawn lines of pain etched there. But even in sleep the detective is frowning; Watson fervently hopes that it is the darkness of unconscious delirium his friend finds so displeasing and not the fact that he exists to experience it.

Holmes twitches and then sighs, an infinitely soft sound of resignation. The doctor feels a spike of panic at the thought his efforts have been for nothing, but beneath his fingertips the blood still beats at the man's temples and his chest still rises and falls beneath the blankets if one keeps a sharp eye to perceive it – Watson has spent countless hours doing little else.

When a patient is in danger, their pulse febrile and their body venting blood or fluid with every second breath then time is not only of the essence but an enemy. When the immediate emergency is past and all that can be has been cauterized, bandaged, purged or dosed, then time relents, handing out seconds as if they were hours instead of flinging them away like sand into a desert storm. Both states play havoc with a medico's nerves; but for his part Watson has always detested waiting the most. Because it means there is nothing else he can do.

He scrubs at his eyes and twists at the hip to glance at the clock on the mantelpiece, his eyes taking a moment to focus on the numerals. It has been five long hours of hell and two of worry. For the rest of London it is time to wake and dress, time to breakfast and go about their business. But here is still a limbo, and will remain so until Holmes is out of danger.

It is curious to be back in Baker Street. He's avoided it with an almost superstitious dread for nigh on three years, and yet here he is again, as if he is bound to the place by a tether the length of which he has reached and now it's snapped him back. Curious too to view the place so neat. Holmes' room is still filled with an alarming mix of books, chemicals, weaponry, sheet music and random accoutrements; but there is a template to the disorder, a tidiness that had not been present previously. Piles of papers have not spilt, teacups have not been left, there is no boot in the coal scuttle or pots of open greasepaint on the mantle.

He didn't spare much of a thought for it beyond pure gratitude when Mrs Hudson opened the front door immediately despite the hour. She'd asked no questions at all but directed the men to carry Holmes up to his old room, where Watson found both the fire and the gas lit, a fresh pitcher of water on the washstand and the bed turned down in readiness.

It occurs to him to wonder about such things now. He remembers vaguely, after the memorial service had been held, Mrs Hudson had mentioned something about Mycroft Holmes paying for the upkeep of the rooms. At the time he had been too caught up in his own grief, had accepted it as an eccentricity or a convenience – somewhere for Mycroft to store his sibling's possessions so the matter didn't have to be dealt with immediately. The third option, that Mycroft had reason to believe his younger brother would return, had not occurred to him – although it seemed sickeningly obvious viewed in the light of recent events.

As for Mrs Hudson's lack of surprise, he supposed word had been sent to her just as it had been sent to him, via a bunch of Street Arabs. Wrapped in her shawl, with her hair still pinned and her face tight with expectation she had the look of a woman who'd been waiting at the fireside for an hour or more.

The one piece of the puzzle that has yet to resolve itself is how Holmes' rag-tag saviours had known he was in need of aid. Constable Clark had left almost as soon as the detective was secured in his rooms, and Watson, having far more pressing matters to worry about, had let him.

He rubs a hand across his face wearily, exhaustion tugging at his sleeve. He knows he ought to sleep while he can; likely in another two or three hours Holmes will wake and there will be another episode of coughing and vomiting as his body strives to rid itself of the fluid in his lungs and any remnants of the poison still in his stomach.

He leans back in the chair and cushions his head against his palm, but sleep does not come. Fidgeting and then sitting straight once more he reaches out and clasps the bony wrist which lies outside the covers, his fingers curling around the delicate skin where tendon and veins lie so close to the surface, the pulse beating beneath his fingertips. Some of the tension drains from him at that small reassurance.

_This is ridiculous,_ he thinks to himself, but cannot bring himself to let go. He shifts the chair a little closer, relaxes as best he can and, after a moment hooks his feet up onto the lower edge of the mattress. Only then, slumped in the chair with his legs stretched out and with that unsteady beat against his touch is he able to relax enough and close his eyes, dozing fitfully.

* * *

NOTES

"For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth. My heart is smitten and withered like grass... My bones cleave to my skin for I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping… My days are like a shadow that declineth..." - taken from Psalm 102


	10. Chapter 10

It is some time the following night when he awakes, seemingly calm. He looks at Watson, or rather past him, with a vacant expression as if he has no knowledge of where he is and no curiosity about how he came to be there.

"How do you feel?"

He closes his eyes and mutters thickly, "Not well."

The natural thing to say would be 'do you know what you did?' but that is obsolete, for of course Holmes knows what he did, because he is Holmes and he is always aware of such things. So the doctor looks at him instead, unable to bear that the man had tried to destroy himself.

He swallows, wets his lips with a tongue that feels leaden and still tastes of ash. "I know what you want me to say. Very well, I shall oblige you. I'm an idiot."

But only, Watson has to suppose, if 'idiot' is short-hand for 'calculating unspeakable bastard'. "This was a mistake?"

They both know it was not. "No. Not exactly prime fodder for one of your stories, is it?"

"Shut up." It's not what he wants to say. He'd patched up Holmes before, has stitched knife wounds and splinted fingers, wrapped broken ribs, has nursed him through nights of excess. But they've never been like this. This he doesn't quite know how to cope with, as any reaction he could have – should have – is turned on its head and rendered incorrect.

He cannot feel joy, because he is still too terrified of what might have been lost. He cannot gather Holmes up in his arms and clasp him close because he is too angry. He cannot rail at the man because his anger will only serve to open psychological wounds that have scarcely ceased bleeding. He cannot demand 'why?' because he doesn't feel strong enough for the answers he'll receive. So he is left, silent, pained and bewildered by all that has happened when he ought to be thanking his stars he has his happy ending.

Holmes' eyes although bruised and bloodshot are far too perceptive. "Still the incurable romantic."

There is a price to be paid for knowing his friend so well, for being able to read the nuances in his voice, rasping and ragged though it may be. He can never find solace in ambiguity, never pretend that he hasn't just been insulted when he has. "You're in a vicious humour when your hurting."

He waves a hand. "So leave."

And this – this is first and foremost of the fears that gnaw at him. That Holmes will shut him out, and once the door is closed set about finishing the task he started. And that Watson, in a moment of anger and weakness he'll have a lifetime to regret – might let him. "Go back to sleep," he orders shortly.

A smile, snide and crooked. "And it will all be better in the morning." He laughs at Watson's stony expression; it's so ridiculous that they both know exactly what he's doing – pushing him away - and neither the doctor nor he seem willing to stop it. His poisoned amusement turns to dizziness and nausea; he shudders and rolls to his side, retching as bile burns the back of his throat. A basin is held by his cheek as he coughs something brackish into it. The scent of his own sickness turns his stomach again and he convulses up further mouthfuls of bile and charcoal, his head and heart pounding unpleasantly at his body's distress. Insides raw and stomach more than empty he collapses back at last, shivering, his eyes closed tight against his own weakness.

There is movement and the edge of the mattress dips as it is sat upon. A cloth, damp and cool is lain on his forehead and then moved to trace the plains of his face, wiping the flecks of grey from his lips. He is acutely aware it is far more than he deserves. A hand runs through the snarls of his hair, and Holmes wonders if perversely, vomiting hadn't been a blessing in disguise: in such a state he can't say anything stupid and Watson can't be truly angry with him.

He closes his eyes, meaning to sleep but it seems even sleep takes an effort he cannot muster. "I must be keeping you from your work." To his ears his voice holds a strained note of meekness and he hopes it doesn't sound self deprecating: false modesty is a far uglier sin than arrogance in his book.

"At this hour? Hardly." He relents and answers with more sincerity: "Nothing that won't keep."

Tired lids crack open a sliver and he can't help but notice how worn Watson looks, frayed and unravelling. "I believe I can sleep without a watchdog," he says gently. He almost adds, 'You look done in,' but stops himself as it seems rather churlish to pass comment when the fault is his. "Surely Mrs Hudson will be wishing to inflict dinner upon you. Or is it breakfast? Some interruption thinly disguised as a repast..."

Holmes is giving him an excuse to bow out, trying to be tactful – something so out of character that Watson almost finds it repellent, as if his friend had started wearing rouge, or henna in his hair: it's an affectation that doesn't suit. (Although at least, he supposes, henna and paint would show theatrical flair.) At the back of his mind is a single cry of panic, petrified that although Holmes is returned to him he is so changed as to be dead in all but body and name. "You once said tact was for those not witty enough to be sarcastic." Not strictly true, but it sounds like something Holmes would say.

"Did I?" His manner has a mildness that speaks of true exhaustion. "I must have been correct then." As a statement it holds no confidence in its own veracity at all. His gaze skulks like a guilty thing as if all he sees is a rebuke: the rooms he deserted, the man he abandoned, the past he cut adrift, the murder his hands committed.

Awkward quiet gathers like cobwebs in the corners of the room, drips and runs into pools of silence that threaten to stain the atmosphere like patches of rising damp. The clock atop the mantle seems to grow louder with every second it counts.

Holmes cannot meet his eye although he keeps trying, his mouth twitching as if he's struggling to swallow words that are rank. "My condolences for your loss," he mumbles at last.

For an empty and surreal moment Watson's thoughts struggle for purchase. His world has been shattered and rebuilt in less than twenty four hours and he is out of practice with following Holmes' sudden seeming _non sequiturs_. Of course the bleakest irony is it is hardly a grand leap of logic, it's just that the doctor's life has been tipped upside down and he has yet to recover his senses.

He blinks and then touches a hand to the black silk of his cravat, fixed with a simple jet and silver pin. His collar feels too tight. "Thank you." The words are still thorns in his throat, even after a year and a half, but the thorns are smaller at least.

After a moment he realises that he expected Holmes to say more. The Holmes of old would have made further comment, surprising him either by a turn of sheer poetry or sheer inappropriate idiocy - for he had a flare for both. To offer the comment and then just leave it, orphaned... Holmes never spoke or acted without a specific goal in mind, it was one of the things that made him so brilliantly infuriatingly _Holmes._

Why, in the middle of the night, returned from the dead but only half-way back to the land of the living, would he – apropos of nothing – mention his regret at Mary's passing?

Watson's mouth narrows as do his eyes in tired exasperation. "Whilst I appreciate the sincerity audible in your words, old boy, if you continue to try to pull such low shots I'll be forced to throw you downstairs. The only reason you could have for broaching the subject at this moment is as a deflection," he continued, "and a craven one at that. Mary never tolerated much of your nonsense when she was alive and I don't believe the discarding of mortal coils would change her views any." His words were leant an odd rhythm by the strain of leashing his temper.

Holmes throws back a corner of the blankets, revealing his clothes from the previous night, rumpled and smelling of sickness and the poppy-house; with all that had happened, Watson had only ever got as far as removing his shoes and socks. One pale and slightly grubby foot quests outwards.

"Where in heaven's name do you think you're going?"

"Elsewhere."

"You're in no state to..."

"For godsake let me up!" There is a wildness to the words that trespasses on panic, and Watson lets go of him immediately.

Holmes drags himself up, muscles too weak to be graceful, sliding his legs around until he is sitting precariously on the edge of the bed, a moment's dizziness from falling out of it. He aims for nonchalance, as if he isn't gathering his strength, isn't calculating how and for how long he can stand without pitching right over. His composure is farcical, his old glacial indifference shattered and ragged to a layer of frost and a sorry one at that.

None the less, he makes it to the mantelpiece without stumbling and with a scruffy sort of dignity. There he stands, swaying ever so slightly, hunched forward, the crown of his head resting against the gilt frame of the mirror that hangs there. His eyes are barely open, as if he can't bear to catch sight of even a sliver of himself in the silvered glass. He swallows. "I need to tell you what happened..."

He can't keep the bite from his words. "I think it's patently clear what happened old boy. You took enough opiates to down a horse and almost died. And, since it's unlike you to make such an embarrassingly elementary mistake of, say, confusing half a bottle of laudanum with Paregoric, I have to conclude you did it on purpose." He looks at Holmes' expression but doesn't relent. "Or were you referring to something else? Perhaps you wished to tell me why you were in London with the Yard but without me? No, let me guess. Colonel Moran. Although that opens up an unpleasant can of worms, doesn't it? So perhaps what you really want to tell me is why you staged your own death and kept up the pretence for three years before returning home to kill yourself in earnest..."

"_John."_

There is a world of anguish in that one word, but it's the use of his Christian name more than anything else that shuts Watson up. He rubs a hand across his forehead. Despite his anger, he does not think this is the sort of discussion to be had with a friend and invalid who has no business standing let alone speaking on such a matter so damaging to the nervous constitution of those involved. "You don't have to tell me anything." But, he realises as he says it, it is the only way Holmes _can_ have this conversation.

A spectre of his usual self in every way, the very act of standing one that wears him out, yet standing he is, holding on to the mantelpiece for support, trousers un-braced and shirt miss-buttoned, eyes like beads of polished jet at the bottom of two deep and grimy wells...

Should the conversation not got to plan (and there would be a plan, and an outcome he was angling for because after all this is Holmes) he could shield himself behind his frailty. _Awfully tired old boy, my mind must be wandering, think I'll go back to bed _– safe in the knowledge that it could all be filed under the convenient fiction of 'inadvisable moments of delirium'.

"You don't understand you must listen – you must listen to me," his voice is fractured. "You don't know what I did, I..."

In that moment he finds the calm he has been seeking. "I know exactly what you did."

His eyes rise beneath half-mast lids, a mixture of equal hope and fear shaded by dark lashes. "Do you?"

Watson sighs, it seems he's done little else since he was called to the Ratcliffe. Sighs of worry, sighs of impotent fury, sighs of it's –all-gone-to-the-devil-but-perhaps-it-will-get-better-because-it-has-to-please-god-it-has-to. This particular sigh is of resignation and unhappiness. It all comes back to Moriarty. "You took your revolver," he says softly. "You never take your revolver. And the note about the imaginary English woman needing a doctor – that had your mark all over it. The Professor would have been more blunt."

The lashes lower to mask his eyes, his face a study of pained self-loathing. "I shot him," he says, the words dragged out because he is no coward and they need to be voiced.

Watson nods, his expression betraying no surprise because he feels none. Holmes is looking at him, and he realizes that words are required, because to keep silent will keep Holmes locked within this dark and soul-destroying place he has banished himself to. As a doctor – and friend – he wishes to heal the man. But he doesn't know the right words to staunch the guilt bleeding from this mortal self-inflicted wound in Holmes' spirit. "I think you forget who you're talking to..."

"How could I possibly…"

"It's been three years," he snaps and there's a brittleness he wishes he could banish from his voice. He understands – truly he does – and perhaps that's the worst of it, because it means he cannot hate the man despite the pain he has caused. It's as if Holmes was a doctor who had set a broken bone in haste; Watson is glad still to have a functioning limb, but it is unsightly and brings flashes of pain and slight rancour each time the weather changes. "I think you forget," he repeats. "I saw worse in Maiwand."

So that is what it comes down to. Holmes had never dreamt he'd receive accolades for his actions, he wasn't so base. But he had soothed himself with the dream of quiet acceptance. A knowing look from the _vox populi_, tinged with sorrow that said _'I understand old boy. I would have done the same'_ or if nothing else, _'there's no shame in doing what had to be done'_ – an old soldier's reassurance.

Yet this is what he's been given: no look at all – Watson couldn't even level his gaze and instead had directed it at the grate – just words which barely seemed to touch on Holmes, encompassing the rest of humanity instead. _I've seen worse._ It was a backhanded statement, as if damning with faint praise – _you might well be an unspeakable bastard, it isn't my place to say, but you're not the most unspeakable bastard I've ever laid eyes on._

"Do you think I only ever healed? Do you believe I never shot and killed anyone?"

The salve does not stick. "You were a soldier and that was a war..."

"_This_ was a war!" Watson bites back, anger rising. "This was a war, with you on the front line against the very worst element of society, with myself and the Yard as inadequate reinforcements!" He is breathing hard, years of loss banked high and now providing fuel for his ire. "You are not a god Holmes, nor infallible although God knows you pretend to be because that is what we all need of you. You were the only one capable of finding Moriarty, of standing up to him at all and so it was you we sent against him – a one man crusade because we lacked the resources to fight him ourselves." If he had hoped that truth might form the thread to stitch the wound closed he was disappointed.

"I failed."

For a moment Watson fumes, because there are so many retorts to that. _Don't be so bloody ridiculous,_ being very high on the list. Because to any other man, all that occurred would not have been a failure. A victory tendered through high personal cost to be sure, but not a failure, not with the gang broken, the lieutenants captured and the general dead.

Sherlock Holmes, as he has made patently clear time and time again over the years is not other men, and indeed often seemed to take a perverse pleasure in reiterating the fact through word and deed as if he needed to shake himself free of the prosaic on a daily basis lest it smother him. If shooting Moriarty was a failure, then it was one that had been inevitable from the start: the sacrificing of a lone and powerful chess piece to put the King of Criminals in checkmate.

"You didn't fail," he retorts, unable to elaborate from the tangle of words and anger in his head.

The dark eyes close and his head turns down and to the side as if the sentiment is a knife thrust he is too weary to deflect.

Watson is running out of time. The wound has been festering and bleeding for so long that it has leached almost all strength and substance from the force of nature that was once Sherlock Holmes. If he does not treat it and bind it closed then Holmes will die, if not in body than in soul. Providence however is on his side; the great detective cares for London, and London in its own way cares very much for him. _Storm-blue eyes in a pale grubby face, ragged hair, a shaking hand and a folded scrap of paper._ "Sir Benjamin Marlowe, George Ellis, James Langton, Anne Mayhew and daughter, Henry Swift, Dr Tobias Fairchilde, Charlotte Royce, the Griffiths brothers, Alice Mackintosh... Dr John Watson."

The breath hisses softly from between his lips as some of the fight and tension goes out of him. He looks, Watson considers, not like a man at peace but like one in agony who's been given morphia.

"You know who those people are."

"Yes."

"And you know their significance, why they should be grouped together."

Holmes' listless lack of denial is conformation in itself.

"Who are those people, Holmes?" the doctor needles gently. "What is the meaning behind the names?"

He is silent for so long that Watson wonders if he will answer at all; he suppresses the urge to shift in his seat or to stand and poke the fire. His strained patience is at last rewarded.

"Those are the names of individuals who had fallen afoul of Moriarty and for one reason or another had been singled out, their identity passed on to Moran or Stokes or that wretched little poisoner Varney so that they might meet their end."

"But they are all still alive." It was balanced precariously between question and statement; obviously he was still breathing, but he had learnt long ago never to generalize from the particular.

"Correct."

"And what is the reason for their survival?"

A swift glance, filled with pleading and tinged with animosity, like a child picked out by a tutor to translate a passage in Latin for which they are ill-prepared. "You know perfectly well," he whispers.

"Say it," Watson commands firmly.

Holmes closes his eyes tight, brows knitted together in an outward sign of his inner turmoil, as guilt and acceptance trade blows in a vicious battle for dominance. His hands tighten on the mantelpiece, knuckles showing white, his breath straining in his chest, every muscle taut to breaking.

"Say it."

He flinches as if struck, his eyelids springing open. But the imperative seems to be the spur he required, because his mouth opens and words emerge, dragged hoarsely from his lips. "They... they are alive because I broke the Professor's gang... and shot Moriarty."

"And with all you know and all you have ever observed, if you had not done as you did, would those ten be alive today?"

It would be argued by any clerk of law that it is impossible to know the future and that any reply given to the question would be pure supposition, quite invalid as evidence. However, Sherlock Holmes has for many years made it his business and livelihood to know the future before it happened by the simple application of deductive reasoning: here is X, therefore Y must follow. After all, even a child knows that if a ball is rolled down a slide unhindered then it will reach the bottom – some things in this world are inevitable.

"No," Holmes admits, the word barely a whisper. "They would not."

He nods, wishing he could claim 'case closed!', stamp and seal it all, bind the whole mess with string and lock it away in a bureau draw never to be touched again. But he cannot, because at last Holmes is talking and there are other questions he needs answered. "Where have you _been?"_

"Hell," he replies simply.

He's uncertain whether this is just banter or a true metaphor for a subject he's unwilling to elaborate upon. "Really. What's it like?"

He turns vague, which is a little like weasling but with more dignity. "Not very nice," comes the clipped reply. "You wouldn't like it. Makes Eastbourne look reasonable."

Watson leans forward a little in his chair. "That's it? I'm left with a note, footprints and bloodstains on the side of a sodding mountain. You're dead for three years and all I get in explanation is 'it was worse than Eastbourne'?"

"I've told you where I've been."

Something in the weariness of the words confuses Watson. "No you haven't."

"I..." He scowls, focusing and refocusing on a patch of air to the right of the candle stick by his hand. He remembers telling Watson, telling... His expression falters. He told his tale to dreams and figments and a hatstand that was likely Constable Clark.

"You haven't told me anything." _A familiar predicament,_ he almost adds, but stops himself in time. Goading Holmes too far will make him unbearable, and right now the detective is looking for just such an excuse.

When he next speaks his voice runs on a level, words pushed out as if he is in a hurry to be rid of them. "Moran was at Reichenbach, I left and he followed. I'd meant to go to Florence but Austria was more congenial it transpired. I went to Vienna and then down to Istanbul and through Turkey always heading East, never stopping, I crossed a cotenant without pausing to tie my shoelaces. He almost caught me in Kathmandu, and I was finally quit of him at Nyalam where the winter proved a staunch ally, closing his path and wiping my trail clean. When I was able to travel again I headed Westwards. Persia. Egypt – I could never seem to get warm, no matter where I..."

"Why did you come back?" He has often been accused of being a glutton for punishment in having a long-standing association with Holmes. It is only in asking that question that he fears it might be true. He wants the answer to be _'I missed you'_ or _'I needed you'_ or some other such piece of sentiment; but he knows it will not be.

Holmes knows it too, his eyes close briefly. "Mycroft wired me to say Moran was at large in London."

"Mycroft knew you were alive?" He is amazed his voice sounds so calm. "You told him?"

"I told him nothing!" Holmes snaps. "He worked it out without any aid from me."

The doctor nods, grateful to be spared that little indignity in a sea of agony. "So you returned. You dealt with Moran and then you went to a hop-house to kill yourself?"

There is no reply, because it is perfectly accurate.

"Why?" Some of his serenity has slipped like a badly formed mask. "Why couldn't you just come back here? For god's sake Holmes, as if murder and gross deception wasn't enough you must add suicide to your list of crimes." He sees the man open his mouth but cuts across him. "And please don't spout some rubbish about wishing to protect me as if I was an innocent in need of shielding from your actions," he says bitterly. "It demeans us both."

"I don't find myself particularly demeaned," he retorts.

Watson has always been amused by such quips in the past. They raised in him a feeling of fond exasperation, occasionally tinged with an irascibility strong enough to wish to lash out as one would to a sibling who is being particularly obnoxious. But this time he finds fondness lagging far behind the growing desire to shake the man until he was insensible and then shake him some more. "You're being purposefully facile."

"Certainly not." He speaks too quickly, exposing his own lie.

Watson's countenance has taken on a stony cast. "If you're being serious you obviously feel there is nothing more to discuss," he challenges. "It's all settled then, and everything can go back to how it was before you died?"

He smiles, a sickly shadow of his usual easy charm, too bright, too brittle. "You might not believe that and I might not believe that - but it's a glorious hypocrisy to indulge in none the less. Don't you think?"

It's as Watson steps forward to punch him that he realises that is exactly what Holmes wants. The detective has had years of practice getting under his skin, learning what boundaries may be skipped across with abandon and which are a step too far. What concerns Watson, is why he is being shut out and left to rage pointlessly in the cold. Why would Holmes rather be struck than embraced? He clenches his fist a little tighter and lowers it. "Is this how it is to be? You'll continually nettle me until I lose my temper and then you'll be able to leave in self-righteous misery?"

"Dear boy why would I leave this is my room." His words are a swift monotone.

Watson recognises that mode of speech, Holmes always employed it at his most belligerent. _I cannot believe for three years this is what I prayed for... _Too late he realises he has spoken aloud.

"I never meant to come back!" it is a hollow whisper delivered with the force of a shout and the words crash upon the doctor like a run-away carriage, smashing past to leave him dazed and bleeding where he fell.

Holmes looks away because god help him he doesn't have the nerve for this. Not now – not again. His words are nearly expressionless, running along a single fault-line of stress. "I never meant to come back to you. I'd failed – ruined all I was supposed to be – sunk down to Moriarty's level, proved myself no better than he in moral character and far poorer in intellect. What should have been the glory of my career was the worst defeat I have ever suffered – self inflicted no less, because _I was not good enough_." Those words are spat out from between clenched teeth. "I had no right to come back, to continue as if nothing had happened. I returned to London only to deal with Moran. But then when I saw you..."

"The bookseller," Watson interjects numbly.

"The bookseller. It was selfish, I know. I couldn't stop myself from seeing you one last time. Satisfying myself you were fine without me."

The doctor held great issue with the man's definition of 'fine', but that's an argument he will store for another time.

The smile and flippancy is back, more broken and brazen than before. "With that oblique farewell and the business with Moran concluded there was only one further matter on the agenda – that of putting the body of Sherlock Holmes where everyone had supposed it rested these past years. After all, you'd written it up in the Strand old boy, couldn't very well make a liar of you..."

Watson knows the words are designed to wound and so ignores them. "Are you mentally deficient?" he enquires after a moment.

Holmes looks at him, eyes temporarily unguarded in surprise, mouth parted but no sound emerging.

"After a lifetime of logic, that is where your reasoning takes you?"

"I..."

"You shot a man who ought to have hanged ten times over. To compound your crime - and really, this is what I take issue with - you then leave those who care for you believing you are dead, suffering at your loss whilst you gad about on the Continent – or hell – or Eastbourne – or wherever the deuce it is you went! Belatedly you return to finish off one scrap of the duties you shirked and then, job done, you proceed to kill yourself with opium because the world believes you dead and you feel generous enough to oblige. _How in the name of heaven is that logical?"_

"Because what I did was unforgivable!"

"_You're damn right it was!"_

Something in his gaze quiets, locks down and goes still like a creature crawling away to die. If Watson had to name it he would call it 'hope'.

Those five words drew a sharp knife across the throat of forgiveness and left it bleeding on the carpet. Holmes shifts his feet, curling his toes as if to avoid the metaphorical puddle of crimson, and immediately despises himself for it. "I see," he says softly, addressing the hearth rug, because he sees far too much and is currently wishing he could stop. Nirvana must be very peaceful. "So why did you..." He bites his tongue – literally – his teeth snapping shut on the words so fast the edge of his tongue is still in the way, pain and the taste of copper rewarding his stupidity. He does not want to ask that question because he does not want to hear the answer. The answer that Watson will give will kill him, and it will be an infinitely more painful death than the one he'd tried to orchestrate for himself.

Watson will say that he is a doctor, and he holds to his oath. He will say that allowing Holmes' death does not balance the unlawful killing of Moriarty. He will say that if he is set on pawning his soul in the name of the Empire and its Good, then he should not be such a coward as to try to renege on the arrangement when it no longer suits him. Perhaps he will even say that saving Holmes' life has given him the chance to atone, in word, thought or deed for the murder he committed...

For a moment Holmes closes his eyes, feeling wretchedly sick, but a second later he forces himself to open them and look at the doctor, awaiting the axe to fall.

John Watson does not say any of the things Holmes scripted for him. In fact he does not say anything at all. But he lifts his head a little and looks up at the detective, and his look says a very great deal.

Holmes had not expected sorrow, tinged with understanding and pity. He finds it hard to breathe, his ribcage has become three sized too small and his heart two sizes too big. The air stutters in his throat, the sound of his pulse thundering in his ears and his fingers clutch convulsively at the mantelpiece.

"Holmes?"

The floor tilts alarmingly, quite against his wishes, and the room appears to be full of raw cotton that obscures sight and sound. Standing is suddenly too much effort, so he allows his body to convey him floorwards. He's dimly aware of Watson crouching anxiously by him. _Not to worry dear boy, just a little tired..._

"Breathe, Holmes," the doctor orders.

For some moments Holmes finds that simple act takes all of his concentration and energy as his lungs seem singularly ill-equipped to the task, resembling a compressed and sodden sponge more than a functioning organ. The grey recedes from his vision and the sparks of white fire from his brain returning clarity to him as he takes shallow hasty sips of air. "You... you don't despise me then?" he asks as soon as he is able.

"My dear fellow," Watson murmurs. "How on earth could I?"

"But I do not have your forgiveness." It is a statement.

A mixture of amusement and infinite sorrow crafts lines around the blue eyes as they stare down, and a huff of almost-exasperation leaves his mouth. "Holmes... I cannot possibly forgive you." His voice is velvet and lead like a funerary urn.

Holmes stops breathing, having lost all interest in the practice.

"How am I to forgive you - if you will not forgive yourself?"

And then it is not sorrow that keeps his lungs still but wonder. The white sparks return and colour leaches from his vision but he isn't looking at anything in the outside world anyway so it scarcely matters. He is reliving the last fifteen seconds of his life in all their pain and splendour. Breathing is a distraction; he doesn't have the attention to spare, not when every shattered and aching fibre of his being is wrapped around the doctor's words and all they meant. Because of course what they meant was that Watson did forgive him – or was willing to if given the opportunity - he just didn't see the point in having a long and protracted argument on the subject, which would be the inevitable result for as long as Holmes still horded self-loathing in his soul. Instead he would wait; when Holmes had slain his own demons and lain their corpses to rest then Watson would decorate their graves with the wreaths of his absolution.

He suddenly finds that image as funny as it is delightful and dearly wants to laugh, only it seems he's forgotten how. Seems in fact he's forgotten how to do anything much, so he returns to smiling at Watson's words, letting the sound of them loop round him like ribbons and bind him whole again...

A set of hands is shaking him roughly by the shoulders causing his head to jar against the floorboards with a crack and he to gasp in surprise.

Holmes turns his eyes again to the outside world in some bewilderment to find Watson leaning over him wearing an expression that Holmes has long ago accepted as habitual in his presence – that of a not-quite-scowl. A weak smile softens it. "Thought you might have been leaving for a moment there, old boy."

"No," he says, an affirmation and promise all in one. But he is tired, so after all he might have to stretch the bounds a little. His eyes skitter in his sockets, seeking out the form of his bed as if by looking at it he might be transported there.

The other man is smiling, a stronger smile this time and a more familiar one. "Bed," he agrees, helping Holmes to sit up and contemplate full verticality. "I'll help you up but I'm not bloody carrying you, come on..."

"Mother hen..."

* * *

NOTES

Paregoric – a very mild tincture of opium used to calm asthma.


	11. Chapter 11

It's said that familiarity breeds contempt, like something one was bound to come to with time - but he had never thought so.

People at their core didn't change much as a rule. Sometimes circumstances could reshape them, break them, call something latent to the fore... But for the most part one could see it in them all along, if one had bothered to look. Those he spent time with and despaired at as barely worth the effort he had always found tiresome; proximity simply reinforced the notion. Likewise his respect, once given, remained and wasn't something that wore off like cheap paint.

What familiarity did breed - which, Watson decided, was all the more dangerous - was a sort of _lasse faire_ carelessness.

Spend all your time with a viper and one becomes used to it. You'll train yourself to watch it out of the corner of your eye, to always move just out of range of its fangs. You'll never forget it's poisonous... but you'll forget your initial fear of it.

And eventually, when you think you know it, that's when out of the blue the serpent will grow an extra inch overnight and next morning you'll suddenly find its fangs in the back of your arm and those copper-jewel eyes looking blank and smug (which is snake for, 'you've only yourself to blame old boy'). As the venom burns in your veins, the only thought you'll have to console you is that it wasn't so much stupidity that tripped you up, as familiarity. Thinking you knew something when if fact you didn't have a damn clue. Not much of a consolation as it happens, since the poison's spreading through your blood just the same.

He had got used to being around Holmes. It had seemed patently ridiculous to go through every meeting tensed against chaos that was ever-present anyway, so he'd stopped. He stopped trying to be polite, as if the detective was a cobra he could charm. He treated him as he treated anyone else, smiling when he felt like it and sniping at him when he didn't. Behind his oddly imperious manner his dark eyes had looked bemused; although Watson had no idea in those early days whether Holmes was pleased or just grimly laughing at his audacity whilst he plotted how best to plan his demise. Which made it sound like they'd hated each other at first; they hadn't in the least, but there had been some inevitable bruising of personalities until they discovered how they best fitted together.

He had got used to a lot of things rather quickly when he came to live in Baker Street. Holmes had given a brief list of his faults as they occurred to him when they first met, but that didn't cover his foibles in their entirety. Watson had accustomed himself to the fact that personal space and personal property did not mean as much to his fellow lodger as they did to the rest of society. Rooms would be entered without announcement, and on the rare instances he did knock there would be no pause to ascertain whether he was welcome or not. But at the time, having come back from Afghanistan, Watson didn't find it so alarming; armies in their tents amidst their wars took the view that sand and bullets didn't announce themselves so neither did the soldiers.

He'd got used to the company too, the physical presence of another in close proximity and the thousand casual touches the detective denied the world but lavished carelessly on Watson. A pat on the shoulder, a hand on his arm, a shoulder pressing against his, fingers meeting briefly over the passing of teacups. Holmes had not seemed to mean anything by it, just as he meant nothing by setting the hearthrug on fire or lying for three days straight on the ottoman and brooding. It was just one of those things. The rain fell, the smog curled through the streets and living with Sherlock Holmes was like rooming with a neurotic but affable scientist the caliber of which wouldn't be out of place in a novel by H G Wells.

If Holmes' idea of social interaction with him was somewhat idiosyncratic, with the rest of the world it was positively mordant.

He recalled one of the early cases involving a young man called Mortimer who was reported missing by his fiancé. The trail had led Holmes to a particular corner of Jago's Isle and a den there frequented by Lascars. He had gone to lengths Irvine wouldn't contemplate to make himself present the perfect picture of an addict and then submerged himself in mahjong, opium, green tea, abattoir alleys and wharf-side slums for four days. Returning briefly to Baker Street (worn and ragged but determined) he'd found Gregson waiting for him. The Yarder had swiftly concluded Holmes was either a lunatic or a lush and should never have been consulted in the first place. Watson had found himself refereeing a heated argument that never quite managed to boil over into all out insults - although lord knew it came close.

It wasn't that he believed they'd actually start brawling, nor that he thought he'd be effective in separating them if they did. It was simply that it gave them someone else to scowl at and he got to listen whilst they played at pretending they weren't doing each other a favour: Gregson in giving Holmes something to do and Holmes in doing it.

Despite the questions that went round in circles, despite the snide comments and pointed looks, Watson found himself in surprisingly good humour. It amused him (darkly) that sometimes he didn't know whether he wanted to give Gregson or Holmes the first and hardest swipe to the back of the head. And it relieved him that Holmes was back, unharmed, and might actually have a meal and a full night's sleep – both of which had likely been lacking. It also pleased him that the argument was serving more purpose than the two of them letting off steam; Gregson had recanted his accusation and Holmes had conceded to keep him better informed of his doings in future. (He wouldn't, although he'd mean to.)

He had stood and stepped away from the table with its debris of papers, tea-trays, chemistry apparatus, and glasses (whisky for him, brandy for Holmes, and a sneer from the Yarder who'd been too apoplectic to accept a drink when offered,) walking Gregson to the stairs when he left. He felt that to remain sitting calmly sipping his whisky after witnessing such an epic loss of temper on all sides was a slight that the Inspector didn't deserve and it would be imprudent to spoil his regained equilibrium where Holmes was concerned. So he had stood, manners polished to a shine and shown him out, murmuring how Holmes' methods may be unusual but they got results and he was sure to have news in a day or so.

Watson's thoughts had been on his fellow lodger as Gregson walked down the stairs to the front hall and the doctor stared after him without really seeing him at all, too busy privately cursing the brilliance and impossibility that was Sherlock Holmes. With a barely audible sigh he turned on his heel back to the sitting room, the glass full of whisky and the dark-haired embodiment of trouble he'd left glowering at the mantelpiece.

He paused to close the door behind him before facing the room again. As he turned, for the briefest second he registered a body standing close, a scent of pipe-smoke and the Thames, grubby shirtsleeves, and a tired face with eyes that burnt like opium resin. One hand was on his shoulder, one hand at his waist as the detective eliminated the last inches of space between them and closed their mouths together in a kiss that was both hungry and unhurried.

His nerves sang, his mind dizzied, and for a second lost to surprise Watson felt a deep and agreeable tide of desire before cold shock conspired to drown such feelings out. His hands had almost reached to curl about Holmes' waist, pulling him closer. Now instead they were pushing him sharply away, creating distance and letting him take a half pace back, putting the detective out of his own arm's reach as much as anything else. He felt colour rise to his cheeks and tried to laugh, although the attempt was off, growling something about Holmes being drunk.

Holmes stood perfectly still, his face turned a little to the side in an attitude of wariness as he regarded Watson from beneath the safety of long lashes. With contained, unconcerned movements he raised a hand and raked it through the tangles of his hair, pausing to rub at the back of his neck like a hound with an itch. He looked at the doctor for a very long moment, and behind those burnt-umber eyes Watson could see exhaustion, calculation, evaluation, a touch of insolence, and... amusement?

He bowed his head briefly, half hiding a grin that was more mischievous than contrite. "My apologies," he said, his voice quiet with Sunday school politeness. _"Ya pien's_ awful stuff." The corners of his lips twitched higher in what might have been a private smile, and then Holmes left without another word, closing the door behind him.

Watson wanted to swear but his mouth had gone dry. He sat down gracelessly at the empty table and reached for his whisky with a hand whose fingers shook. He drained the glass and grabbed the decanter. Whisky for a snake bite. Burn the venom out. Let the alcohol destroy the taste of him, the taste of a city in sunlight, the taste of rosewood and shag tobacco, the taste of something as crystalline as diamond yet as powerful as a drug... He swallowed down most of an alarmingly full glass without feeling the whisky burn his throat at all.

Damn Holmes.

And damn him - at least he'd stepped away - but had he said _'what are you doing? What on earth is wrong with you?'_ No. He had not.

And Holmes had just looked at him. And smiled.

Watson suddenly felt queasy with dread as a thought occurred, far, far too late.

Holmes had smiled. That particular and un-pin-down-able 'I know something you don't – give me a shout when you work it out old chap' quirk of the lips.

Oh god.

Instead of muddying his thoughts like ether the whisky had burnt away his shock, allowing him to remember the incident with indecent clarity. He hadn't said _'Good god man, you're drunk!'_ although he'd thought he had - assumed he had. He'd said, "For god's sake, not when you're drunk!" Which, as things went was both infinitely more true and more incriminating than he'd ever meant to let on.

He had known Holmes for roughly four months, which he was very aware wasn't long at all. But in that time he had learnt several key facts of his character; it had been a very steep tuition curve.

If some whim came to mind, he would indulge it. If someone opposed him in any way, he would have retribution - usually by outsmarting them. When working on a case he considered no trick, deception or ploy beneath him – as Watson had discovered scarce a month into their acquaintance when Holmes had false-faced insanity and suicidal tendencies to get committed to an asylum whose superintendent he was investigating. His interests were as varied as the topics which bored him and he perused one with as much fervor as he shunned the other. He judged everyone as he judged himself: by his own just, exacting yet peculiar set of values, not giving a damn what society or anyone else thought along the way. Oh, and if something hadn't exploded, imploded, drowned, eviscerated, burnt, turned toxic, been shot, experimented on or had fits of the vapors in the man's presence then it was only a matter of time.

Despite all of this, he had still never imagined that he would be standing outside Holmes' door, breath held and hand raised to knock, wondering how on earth to have a conversation about the fact Holmes had just kissed him. Frankly that took 'bohemian' and added brass knobs, ate the biscuit and whistled 'Peasepudding Hot' whilst it did so. It was just like Holmes to ignore all forms of etiquette and sense when it suited him, yet contrive (whilst being dead beat, half-cut and in the middle of a case) to dare Watson into having a conversation on such an indelicate and outlandish topic. And it was a dare – because Holmes knew if no conversation was had Watson was sweeping everything under the carpet. And if a conversation did occur, they both knew that would not be the end of it.

He knocked and, taking a leaf from Holmes' book, entered immediately before he lost his nerve. "Why did you do that?" he demanded without preamble.

The detective was perched on the edge of his bed, perusing various case notes. His eyebrows canted at an angle, an almost pantomime _'do what, my dear fellow?' _but at the last moment his expression softened and he raised his shoulders in the smallest of shrugs. "Because I wanted to."

For a moment Watson wondered if he'd been wrong, if this had all been a crazed whim no different from a thousand other crazed whims and just as devoid of meaning. He couldn't tell if the fizzing sensation in his gut was intense relief or intense disappointment. "That's all?"

A smile, sincere and dangerous. "Because I've wanted to for the past five weeks, three days and sixteen hours. Give or take," he added, as if it mattered.

Watson felt his shoulders slump and heard the breath rush from his lungs in a wholly lost and inadequate, "Oh."

Dark eyes took his measure second by second, reading a hundred answers and a thousand truths in his posture and the cast of his face. Holmes dropped the papers he held and advanced. Suddenly skittish it took all the doctor's nerve not to give ground. Holmes stopped, paused in motion and resplendent in disarray like a Hogarth sketch come to life. "I'm not drunk you know, nor was I in the dens - spent most of today evading Mr Oldgate and being chased through Jago's Isle as it happened, before holing up in a delightful little establishment in..."

"That's not the point!"

"Given what you said earlier I rather thought it was. And you have been with men before..."

"_That_ isn't..."

"What – likely? Discernible? Polite?"

"The point!" Watson snapped.

"Very well," he folded his arms. "What is the current point?"

"The current – the _point_ – is that this isn't something we ought even be contemplating."

"So you are contemplating it? Capital. I couldn't be certain..."

"There would be consequences!"

"Of course there would," he agreed with a hint of wickedness.

"Not those consequences!"

He looked disappointed.

"We'd be breaking the law!" Watson realized later that he'd never known true insouciance until seeing the expression on Holmes' face at that instance.

"That isn't law," he announced with a perverse and grandiose certainty.

"I think you'll find it is," he retorted.

The other man made a noise that sounded like _'t'feh'_ and was drenched in disdain, following it with, "I think you'll find I don't care." Abruptly he dropped both topic and attitude and focused again on Watson with a look that said a great deal, none of which was printable without the aid of a censor and a quart of black ink.

He rolled his eyes – dear god he was incorrigible. "I am not adding a criminal undertaking to my daily life. I've got enough trouble dealing with you!"

"But I'd join in, obviously," he countered, moving closer again, sensing a victory or at worse a tie when Watson didn't so much as flinch. "You always claim I need things to keep me occupied."

Watson had lost – was lost. He growled, bowing his head and hiding his face against the detective's shoulder, since it was there and it seemed the thing to do. "I'm not your next experimental project, damn you," he huffed, words muffled by Holmes' shirt which still smelt of river-silt, sweat and opium.

"In truth dear boy I rather feared I was yours." There was a smile hiding in his words. His jaw dipped as his lips brushed Watson's ear and, "Consequences," he commented appreciatively.

Watson tried not to laugh.

Holmes tilted his head back this time, arching his spine a little so he could see Watson better. After a moment a diamond-pure grin graced his mouth. "That's a yes, isn't it?"

In reply the doctor made a small incoherent sound of amused despair. Four months – four damn months. "I'm trying to think of a perfectly reasonable excuse to say no," he shushed him.

The grin grew wider. "But you can't think of one, can you?" This was not strictly true. Holmes could think of at least five, which meant the man whose nose was currently pressed against his collarbone could certainly name three.

Four months and he'd already caught Holmes' brand of insanity. "No," he admitted, stuck as usual between the mild horror and abject wonder of the whole surreal situation.

"_Mm, consequences,"_ leered the detective happily.

* * *

And then, later, he had got used to a world without Sherlock Holmes too.

It was – and he'd given the matter thought because there were some sterling contenders for the title – the hardest thing he'd ever done.

Candahar and the slaughter at Maiwand had been awful – biblically so. Enteric fever had been hell. Returning to London and not falling to ruin had been a hard slog worthy of a Salvation Army parable. But day after day, existing in a world that no longer held Sherlock Holmes was indescribable.

Holmes had said it once, when he was in one of his moods, like Hamlet complaining of prisons and nutshells, that the world was stale. _Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material?_ He had, Watson considered, no damn idea of the true meaning of any of the words he used. Nothing was as hopeless, as prosaic, as dismal as awaking each day and knowing that Holmes was dead, and the world – no, damn the world – _he_ would never see his like again.

When Stamford had first described him, Watson had thought (amongst other things) Holmes sounded downright toxic. And he'd been right. The atmosphere of Baker Street was rarified to the point of poison by Holmes and his insanities. But cocaine is a poison, alcohol and morphine too and that does not lessen their allure to some nor their usefulness. Toxic becomes intoxicating as the poison becomes a drug and then a vice. After that heightened, madcap, macabre excitement, the world held no appeal: all the colour was bled from it until it was like existing with an exsanguinated corpse.

To make it worse he knew that he should have been happy. His life had been enviable. A charming, intelligent, beautiful and loving wife, a modest and well-kept home and a thriving practice. The fact that his friend had died should not effect him so; he should speak a eulogy, don a black armband, make his goodbyes at the graveside and move on.

And because he knew the importance of appearances, that was exactly what he did.

Slowly pressing home a silver bodkin of propriety each and every day until his heart was like a pincushion, until he wondered if he had any heart left or just a spillikin-pile of bloody silver pins.

Mary's death - and he felt shameful for admitting it – had been easier to bear. When some cataclysm has torn the moon from the sky, the loss of the stars soon after does not rend the spirit in quite the same way. He had been there at the end, clasped her hand, touched her cheek and told her he loved her, quietly begged her not to leave. And she had smiled, said _'Oh, John...'_ as if he was a schoolboy, and then said no more.

Society had expected him to mourn and so did not begrudge him his grief. He wore black for her. But, late at night as he sat in his study (leaving for as long as possible the time he would retire to cold and empty sheets), when tears ran silent and unchecked, it was for both the people he had loved that he wept.

* * *

NOTES

Ya pien – Chinese name for opium


	12. Chapter 12

Midday sunlight is battling its way past the curtains. It is strange to awake in Baker Street, in Holmes' room, in Holmes' bed, with the man himself somnolent beside him. They are both still dressed, wrapped in a confusion of un-laundered clothes and woollen blankets, which must make the scene greeting Mrs Hudson a strangely innocent impropriety.

"I thought you'd sleep all day." She stands in the doorway, her appearance neat without being uncomfortably immaculate; her dove-grey dress is a little worn but brightened by fresh lace. Her expression is a mixture of concern and fondness, both of which she tries to tidy away out of sight. Her two tenants have in their time been the very worst in London, but they are dear to her despite her complaints; like one living above a city street market who dreams of the peace of the country but can never quite bring themselves to leave. Having the same tenants for ten years, and the rooms rented yet empty for three after that meant she'd always felt the house was empty – lacking – waiting for their return. And here at last is _l'enfant terrible_ and his brother in arms. Her life and house are no doubt soon to be put in disarray, but her aspect is the more peaceful for it. "How is he, doctor?" she asks at length.

Watson rubs some of the sleep from his eyes. "Better," he reassures her. "Although his lungs are still very weak."

She nods; she's had two children, both grown now, but she remembers keeping vigil at their side when either was ill, straining her ears in the quiet of the long nights, desperate to reassure herself another breath had been taken. "Luncheon – or would you rather breakfast? - will be in half an hour. I'll bring it up."

"Thank you."

A smile and a slight wrinkling of her nose at the musty mix of smoke, sweat and sickness. And at the sleep-mussed man blinking at her, sand-light hair stuck up in tufts that reminded her of her son Freddy in his younger days. "And after, might I suggest a bath?"

He looks ruefully amused. "For him or me?"

"Both of you," she announces firmly. "While you attend to that I can air out this room."

That put him in his place. "Thank you, Mrs Hudson. I'm sure we don't deserve you."

She tries to look stern, but her eyes are shining. "I'm sure you don't," she agrees, and leaves to attend to breakfast.

* * *

He is sitting in the bath but has barely moved to make use of it. He feels like a plague-ship seeking safe harbour or the proverbial ghost at the feast: desperately craving solace yet unable to force others to bear his presence. It's intolerable. It is, he decides, like falling in love all over again, only worse, because this time he knows precisely what he will lose if he is rejected. His stomach roils and he wishes he could believe the lie he tells himself that it is only the waning opiates that affect him so.

He stares at the reflection of the ceiling and of the light as it rests on the glassy surface of the water. He wonders what on earth he is going to do now. Everything had been planned: he'd even paid Chen Lee to dispose of his body in the morning. (Charming attitude the Celestials have, they consider outliving one's enemies a perfectly suitable form of revenge. As such the Yellow King was quite willing to allow an adversary to destroy themselves in one of his Flower Houses.) His business had been concluded, his death set, and his possessions - up to and including his body - taken care of, leaving his soul to travel lightly on its final journey to whatever judgement awaited him...

Only here he is, nauseous, exhausted, lost and sitting in a cooling tub of water.

Watson returns with a towel and Holmes' old housecoat draped over his arm; he's wearing one of Holmes' shirts and his hair is still damp from his earlier ablutions.

The muscles across his shoulders relax a fraction. He feels less lost in Watson's presence. (Feels like he is navigating an endless quagmire in the dead of night and one wrong footing will sink him, but at least he know where he _is.)_ Perhaps it is only the lure of the familiar, the siren song of halcyon nostalgia. Unlikely, all things considered, but a comforting fiction anyhow.

The doctor busies himself sweeping the discarded clothes into a pile for washing (or possibly burning). His manner is business-like, the bland care of a professional physician. But his looks are always a moment or two longer than need be, his presence closer by a number of inches. This, coupled with a certain forced gruffness, gives Holmes hope. He tries to work out a practical path through his uncertainty; there are a thousand opening gambits. Passive: wait. Active: leave. Practical: wash. Farcical: sing. Communicative: speak. Dramatic: attempt drowning. Surreal: lick taps.

Each beginning had possibilities spidering away from it, occasionally intersected by the actions of others. (Down one particular branch of the Active tree is the conclusion that he is arrested for public indecency, since an argument with Watson earlier in the bough means he storms out of the flat without his clothes. On the Surreal path one strand ends in 'return to Parkhouse – in earnest this time' – and it worries him that he does not find the thought as distasteful as he should.) Mentally he follows one path after another, carving trails of logic and probability, until Watson speaks and his voice shatters all the careful chains of reasoning, showing Holmes just how fragile and useless they were.

"Is the dirt leaving your body by some hitherto unknown process of osmosis?" He looks sternly down his nose at the man in the bath, hoping to goad him to answer or to any action that isn't just sitting and staring like something broken.

There is silence for a time as the detective stares vacantly at the water around him, inanimate. "It's – it's good to see you again." His words are quiet, uncertain of their welcome yet desperately hoping they'll manage to charm one anyway. Holmes looks at Watson, and finds Watson looking back. He wonders if perhaps the doctor knows something he doesn't. It seems exceedingly unlikely on the surface of things; but then he doesn't feel quite as infallible nowadays as once he did.

"You should have sent a postcard," he returns lightly. "The post in London is very reliable, four times a day too."

Holmes gives an unwell smile. Everything is running on double lines. Watson will forgive his crimes, but still holds a grudge for the slight; he wants to save the detective, but is more conflicted on offering succour to the man. Noting the contradiction, he resigns himself to distance.

"I missed you..."

The _sotto vocce_ admission is something Holmes cannot countenance, despite being everything he wants. "But now I'm back" he slices in neatly, "you're remembering my less stellar qualities."

It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if the doctor hadn't been, he is now. In reply Watson picks up the ewer of water and tips it over Holmes' head; it's lukewarm at best.

He splutters but stays sitting with his shoulders hunched and his head bowed, his hair dripping over his forehead in wet spikes. "Was that strictly necessary?"

"No," Watson declares. "But I rather enjoyed it, didn't you?"

Holmes mutters something uncomplimentary as he starts to shiver.

The doctor's mood lightens as he realises perhaps this is not so different from a hundred instances in the past. (It is a simple sequence, one that is all too familiar: Holmes behaves badly to attain a worthy goal. The goal is attained. The rush of victory cools. The Noonday Demon rises, whispering it was all poorly done. Holmes despises the world for creating the battle, and himself for fighting it. It then falls to Watson, has always fell to Watson, to kick him out of it.) This is no different. A thousand times more serious, yes. Different, no.

* * *

The slightest exertion sets Holmes' lungs wheezing, as does moving after staying still or a downturn in temperature. It's like looking after someone in the last throws of pneumonia when the fever has abated but the chest is still half-filled with fluid. Added to his lingering melancholia, chivvying Holmes into the simplest of tasks takes a goodly amount of time and effort. It is almost four in the afternoon by the time they have both bathed, dried, dressed and shaved. Watson feels much refreshed, although it is hard to say whether Holmes felt the exercise was as beneficial.

There is a tea tray awaiting them in the sitting room with the fire stoked high. A copy of the Gazette and the Times lie beside the tray along with two telegrams and a plate of hot cross buns. Watson pours out a tumbler of water from a carafe and adds a measure of something the colour of treacle to it from a slim bottle on the desk.

The detective's expression is troubled, heading swiftly towards pained; Watson doesn't have to look up from pouring the tincture to know it's there. "Plantain," he explains. "Three times a day. Will help your lungs." He reasons that since the plant isn't noxiously toxic Holmes probably doesn't know about it.

He contrives to look slightly martyred, but takes it and drinks it down when it is handed to him.

"Tea?"

He nods and collapses into his old armchair with the sigh of one much taxed by the world.

"You have communiqué," Watson mentions as he busies himself with cups, strainer and pot, trying to ensure Holmes' attention is securely plastered to the world.

A twist of the mouth, like a sufferer of anorexia nervosa being sat at a dinner table. "From Mycroft and Lestrade."

There is a gently expectant silence.

"Lestrade will be informing me Moran is not for the rope. Mycroft will be lamenting the fact deportation is no longer in practice but adding that what can be done to tidy Moran away in a deep dark hole and then a deep dark continent is being done with all expedience."

"I understand that it would be Lestrade and your brother as you haven't seen fit to inform anyone else of your return. But why Moran?"

"What else would it possibly be?"

Since the man makes no move to sit forward let alone reach for the telegrams and read them, Watson does so. He gives a choked snort a moment later and throws them down. "Spot on." He looks at Holmes. "You're concerned?"

"I like the world orderly and quantifiable – I'm concerned when the tea is Earl Grey and not Darjeeling."

Watson wonders whether that was the instance that had Holmes - in a fit of paranoiac boredom and whimsy - convinced that Mrs Hudson was attempting to poison him. He noted also that whilst the statement left no room for doubt over Holmes' preference of tea blend, it didn't necessarily answer his views on Moran. He opens his mouth but is uncertain what to offer. Commiserations? Some sort of jibe? Or perhaps another question in an attempt to draw him out and stop him from forming the brittle shell of wounded impeccablity he was always so fond of donning when in a dark mood. The seconds pass, the fire burns, and in the end Watson says nothing at all.

Holmes wallows in the silence. One hand rubs at the corner of his eye and then is flung down over the arm of the chair; there it knocks against a familiar shape. He stills instantly, eyes alive with a curious tension. His fingers twitch as if they are a separate entity nominally under his instruction, dancing slowly around the edge of the object and its narrow sibling before finally grasping them both and raising them from the shadows at the floor onto his lap. For a very long time he gazes at the Stradivarius and bow, apparently unable to do anything but have them rest across his knees, as if afraid a touch or musical resonance might cause them to shatter. At length his fingers can't help confirming what his eyes have diagnosed: the bow is limber but the horsehair has slipped and requires both rosin and tightening at the frog. Cleaning wouldn't go amiss either. He sets to work, all movement light, methodical, almost trance-like.

Watson watches surreptitiously from the other chair. It is, he supposes, like presenting a horticulturist with a weed-ridden garden, or a veterinary surgeon with a sick dog: the drive to repair is so strong as to be instinctual. He privately sends a prayer of thanks to whatever force inspired Mrs Hudson to unearth the Strad and set it beside the chair next to bow and case and all the accoutrements used in its upkeep.

Both instrument and bow are cleaned and cared for in an operation that's as unhurried as it is meticulous. And when all is done, despite a look of trepidation that suggests he is angling not an instrument but a rabid weasel beneath his chin, Holmes raises the violin and begins to play. The music is slow, sonorous; it would be a dirge but for the yearning at the heart of it.

Time drifts, two hours, three, but Holmes does not notice. His attention is only for the confusions of head, heart and mind that may be drawn out and woven into an endless piece of softly mourning music. It may be enough to heal him, it may not, but he can do nothing else but play.

"Why can I smell hot cross buns?" he enquires of a sudden, bow motionless halfway through an upward stroke across the strings, eyes open and gaze slowly thawing to the outside world.

"Because I'm toasting us some."

He focuses on Watson, violin lowered, puzzlement clouding his features. "Is it Easter already?"

"Last Sunday."

A scowl as Holmes works backwards, counting through the days since his return to London and, as such, life. "How positively irreverent of me," he murmurs.

"Bombastic though your tendencies can be I don't believe you've ever claimed to be a messiah."

He snorts, darker thoughts temporarily chased away by the sheer absurdity of the notion.

"It does however make you a traditionalist, spiritually speaking." There is mischief in his tone; careful mockery of Holmes' recent actions is the only way he can deal with them at present.

"On the contrary, I should have died on the Friday and then..." He is speaking and he knows he oughtn't. Watson does not need to be told his joke was imperfect in its parallels any more than he needed a lesson in Sunday school parables. Nerves and pedantry are conspiring against him.

"Shut up." There is a measure of strain in the imperative, but as if seeking to redress it Watson hands him a hot cross bun on a saucer, toasted crisp and melting with butter.

He lays down his violin and takes the offered dish meekly before retreating once more to his chair, tucking his feet up so he is almost cross-legged.

Watson is looking at the hearth rug, and at half of a bun, impaled on a toasting fork in his hand. He sighs. "I – I still don't understand," he admits quietly. "To me it seems you're the only man I've ever known to attempt suicide out of a sense of probity." A crooked look. "It's very Classical of you, all things considered – more Roman than antique Dane and all that."

Holmes is staring at his hands resplendent with butter-marks and crumbs lying still in his lap, but his attention is fixed on the doctor none the less. "To make yourself something less than you can be - that too is a form of suicide."

It sounds like a quote, a piece of philosophy maybe, but Watson doesn't know from where. "In killing Moriarty you felt you'd effectively destroyed yourself - your potential - so saw no recourse but to carry it out for real?"

"Something like that." It is still a raw topic, like a bruise and he tries to skirt it as best he can.

"You're impossible," Watson informs him.

"I'll have you know I'm merely improbable," he returns.

"Oh don't be infuriating," the doctor chides absently.

"How should I be?" On the surface it is designed to vex, but the shadows in his eyes prove it is a genuine supplication at its core.

"Alive – _yourself,"_ Watson snaps, truth torn out of him because he cannot stand for the detective to sound so vulnerable.

A wan, wide smile and he opens his hands in a shrug. _"Cogito ergo sum."_

Such pale flippancy doesn't reassure or please him in the least. His palm is across his face at a slant, half cradling his brow, half masking his eyes. "I thought you _died!"_ There are so many words to be said but those last two delivered with heat and anguish are a perfect holophrase.

"Would you rather I had?" There is no egotism in the question no be-thankful-I'm-here-now, it is raw and honest in its enquiry.

His fingers move, pinching at the bridge of his nose. "No, no of course not, it's just..." He has no idea how to surmise all he feels – all he felt – and the cost engendered. The loss. The grey days fuelled by depression and memories bitter in their sweetness. "I _mourned_..."

"And I," he says quietly. His fingers toy with his shirt cuff, seeming uncomfortable with their own animation. "Know that for the pain you suffered, I..." He stops, refusing to turn it into some sort of competition like Hamlet and Laertes having their unsightly 'I loved her more' tiff at the open grave. He looks at Watson, a bone-weary and eloquent look, his eyes still full of the weight of their grief.

Watson bows his head and exhales quietly, accepting the cold comfort that he was not the only one lost.

"Old boy, I..." Holmes murmurs, deeply penitent. No actual word of contrition crosses his lips because saying it would lessen the depth of sincerity he wishes to convey. 'Sorry' is a poor and tawdry substitute for his feelings. Sorry is for strangers and jostlings on the street, for lost neckties and late appointments. His shoulders are hunched and his hands spread helplessly as he seeks to cup that profound absence and gift it to Watson instead.

Watson nods, a rueful smile showing bleak acceptance. "Thank you," he says at last.

Holmes looks horrified – or possibly terrified – both emotions are so rare and out of place for him it's hard to discern one from the other. "Watson..."

"Thank you. For coming back. Don't," he warns with utter conviction, "ever do it again."

The Holmes of old would have cocked one eyebrow in innocent challenge and needled for clarification _'Don't come back? Or...'_ but this new Holmes lacks the confidence for such pushy, brash banter. He gives the smallest of smiles instead, as if they had both heard the words he neglected to say, and offers a questioning look, torn and hopeful at the edges.

It is easy for Watson to read – too easy despite the absence and time that lies like a chasm between them. It is a query asking if things will heal – asking if they will ever again be easy in each others company with riotous words and pipe smoke curling amicably around them amidst the comfortable chaos of Baker Street. He should say _'I don't know...'_ perhaps launch into a lecture of how a broken Ming vase even when rebuilt by the best of artisans will never be the same. But he does not. For not only would it be pointless, but it would not accurately address the issue. Holmes is not asking the impossible, does not require a time machine to recapture some past glory. He is asking for a chance to craft a new one.

If anyone is capable of fashioning Ming vases out of the aether, it's Holmes. And Watson would not wish to be anywhere but by his side to watch and lend a hand while he does so. His smile quirks, the bleakness slipping, and that is all the answer he needs to give. "Bed," he announces, levering himself stiffly to his feet. It's early but if he still feels ragged then Holmes must be exhausted.

This time the eyebrows do raise.

Watson snorts. "Don't get excited," he admonishes, crossing the floor and the corridor to Holmes' room, pausing for a moment with his hand on the door handle. "You're not sleeping on your own until I'm certain your lungs won't give out in the night."

Trailing behind, Holmes can hear the thinnest note of strain running through the words and is desperate to banish them. "Don't be ridiculous," he says in a querulous tone designed to irritate. "You can't possibly..."

"Holmes..."

"...sleep here." A half beat. "You snore." His timing is comic and perfect.

There is a very brief silence. "Holmes?"

"Yes?"

"Shut up."

"Yes."

"And don't take all the blankets."

He tries to sound badgered, affronted – "Right." - and fails.

* * *

He awakes at some god forsaken hour when the world is dark, saturated with shadows and fear. His heart is rabbiting against his ribs as if they are a cage it wishes to escape. Inside his chest feel sodden and sluggish, but his anxiety has stemmed from quite another source. One hand clutches at the counterpane as he orders his heart to slow, this fear to abate, his lungs to work.

Movement, and a hand has closed about his wrist. "Holmes?" A pause as ears are strained to assess whether reassurance or further action is called for. "Breathe, Holmes."

He does so, trying to imagine himself a piece of music in stately time, the workings of his body in harmony, and not this discordant mess. He counts the seconds until his breathing is more like a double-breeve in common time, slowing to a march, a dirge. "Stay." It's a plea. The entreaty is not quite desperate, but as close to desperation as Sherlock Holmes ever got.

Watson looks at him in the darkness, and knows it is not a request for the comfort of proximity nor for the reassurance of a petty span of days. It is far, far more than that. He does not answer immediately, but it is not as if he needs time to consider.

There is only one answer he can give – has only ever been one answer. "Of course I will, old cock."

* * *

NOTES

More Roman than antique Dane – an allusion to Horatio's attempt to follow the prince to the grave in _Hamlet_.

"To make yourself something less than you can be - that too is a form of suicide." - Benjamin Lichtenberg

Cogito ergo sum – Latin: 'I think therefore I am,' Descartes.


	13. Chapter 13

It had been in the pocket of his coat, although he hadn't put it there. Holmes turns the little ivory box over and over in his hands, tracing each face with his fingertips, burning the memory of it and all it represents into his mind as indelibly as if it had been carved into his skull like the kanji scored into the ivory.

His own voice, ragged and harsh, forming words used only by the lowest thieves to the worst of whores. The blue eyes before him turning glacial: frost on the surface and a wealth of trouble out of sight. _'When you ain't glock an' coopered, I'll tell you what you said. It'll kick your hykey rotten.'_

A sardonic smile tugs his mouth and he bows his head. _A ream downy twist, that one._ She knew there was no insult she could spit back at him that would smart as sharply as the memory of his own behaviour. The list of ten names had been her handiwork too, an extra little stab at his conscience to make sure he was paying attention – Emmy was good at that, she never played fair. No wonder her family didn't know what to do with her. The question still remained though, how she had the information in the first place. One of Moriarty's old kill-lists was not an easy item to come across – oh there was a puzzle worth solving. But it was a puzzle that could wait. He sighs, his shoulders slumping a little, the opium box pressed between his palms like a Catholic's relic at prayer. He places it with a certain reverence in the middle of the mantelpiece, widening his hands to either side, carelessly sweeping a space around it amidst the clutter of oddments already there.

From his chair, Watson watches all this surreptitiously over the top of his newspaper, but says nothing.

He finds himself in the unenviable position of not just owing an apology (that in itself wasn't novel) but wishing to give one. It was not often that he was sorry for anything, if only because there was a vast gulf between when society considered incorrect behaviour and what he himself thought of as lacking. But just once or twice, he acknowledged his conduct had been unworthy. This was one such instance, and he realises he may need help in the matter. "Watson. How does one make an apology?"

The doctor is used to Holmes' often singular lines of enquiry, but that one takes him by surprise. He lowers his paper and raises an eyebrow. "To whom?"

"A young lady."

The eyebrow remains tilted. "D'you wish this to be a conventional display of contrition, or one styled in your own particular idiom?"

"Let us begin with convention and proceed as appropriate."

Watson couldn't recall the last time – if ever – that Holmes had wished to make formal recompense. He made amends from time to time in his way, dinner at Simpsons, a particular piece played on the violin, that sort of thing... but the actual word 'sorry' did not appear to be in his vocabulary – not even after a three year hiatus and return from the dead. "Do you care?" he asks bluntly. He tries very hard not to feel a stab of bitterness towards this female who is being bestowed such an honour when he is not. Watson reminds himself that Sherlock Holmes will work his way back into his good graces; it will be in his own time and on his own terms, but it will be undeniably thoroughly done. "Really?"

"Yes," he says truthfully.

"Then it rather depends what you did." He waits for further detail but none save a guilty look is forthcoming. "Well. A confession of regret, verbal or written is the usual way. Often coupled with a gift to show sincerity." He expects a sharp rejoinder about the illogical and frankly base idea of equating sincerity with a monetary purchase. To his surprise his friend simply nods, his gaze vague as his mind calculates.

"I believe I shall require your assistance. I must procure certain items."

He strives to keep all curiosity from his voice. "Since you're asking, I assume they're not shag tobacco, chemistry equipment, cocaine, or horse-hair for a violin bow."

"Tobacco may well be an excellent start – I knew I could count on your expertise."

The newspaper is cast aside so he can give Holmes a searching look. "Very well. Are you up to whatever excursion these 'procurements' require?"

A weary smile. "With your aid, yes."

He nods, an off-kilter tip of the chin which speaks loudly of all the questions he isn't asking, a sporting gesture of patience on his behalf that had damn well better be repaid.

The smile softens into something more genuine. "I believe this will be worth your while, and I could use the company old boy."

"Fetch your coat then."

* * *

They stand in Jermyn Street, Holmes muffled in a scarf many cubits in length, folding several bills of sale into his pocket.

"Why did you get them all sent to Baker Street?" Watson muses aloud. "I thought you'd decided contrition via post was the best option so you could – how did you put it? – _steer clear of the lady's propensity for violence."_ A thought occurs. "This apology of yours – it isn't to Mrs Hudson is it?" Another name comes to mind, one more readily linked with the threat of violence – Adler – but he'd rather leave her out of it entirely unless forced.

Holmes gives him a look over the rims of his dark spectacles, one which clearly says, _don't be dull-witted – why on earth would I ever go to Fortnums for Nanny?_

He doesn't point out Christmases past when Holmes had indeed gifted Mrs Hudson with dry-cured Wiltsure ham and quince jelly from the aforementioned fine establishment.

The detective sighs, choosing to answer the original question if only to forestall an argument on other issues. "They are going to Baker Street because, industrious as the postal system of London is, even the Postmaster General's accomplishments stretch only so far."

Watson knows better than to enquire where this mysterious and unreachable address might be. "We've been to Fox and Lewis, Lock's, Fortnum's and Turnbull & Asser. Where now? Floris?" The suggestion had a slight barb in it since (even excluding Holmes' acquisition of a new hat and coat which were obviously for himself) none of his purchases have been especially feminine. "Would she care for a touch of rosewater, this woman of yours?"

Another look over his dark glasses like a disgruntled maiden aunt. They had strolled to Jermyn Street and traversed its length once and Holmes felt as if he had scaled twelve mountains. He is tired, too tired for banter, but he wouldn't have Waston cease for the world; the bickering is comforting, familiar. "No."

"No? What then?"

Holmes tells him.

"I beg your pardon, you want a what?"

Holmes repeats himself, his expression bland which could be hiding a wealth of amusement and devilry or nothing at all – it is always so hard to tell.

"What on earth _for?"_

A different sort of stare this time of the _do keep up_ variety.

Watson shakes his head in bafflement. And then shoots Holmes a worried look. "You do know those can't be sent by post, don't you? Hm. Good, good."

* * *

She is pressed hard into the corner of the cupboard, legs skewed against each wall, the rough wood at her back a comfort of sorts; darkness a boon and a curse in equal measure.

The door opens, blasting light into her world.

"Emmy. _Emmy."_

Objects are lain in arrayment before her, tribute for a queen: shapes that bisect the light but there are too many lines, too many angles for her to calculate and she's never cared for mathematics anyhow and... She closes her eyes, her breath rasping rapidly in and out of her lungs.

"Emmy, you got a present."

The words chime strangely in her ears. Her mind is reeling. "Present," she says. "Present – here – present and accounted for, present and correct, presently by an' by..."

"Emmy," the tone is fond but sharp, trying to snag her flailing attention. "Look."

She knows the voice, trusts it. She opens her eyes, blinking and smarting against the information that wants to drown her. Figures – one thin and male, the other skirted and brash. The brash one with the brassy gold hair to match is knelt at two large baskets, pulling them apart and cooing over the contents. Holding up the shapes one by one, turning their angles in the light and puzzling out their purpose. When the pictures on the labels prove no help, Brash opens them if she is able or if not, thrusts them under Trusted's nose. Trusted is trying to ignore her.

"Gotta skrim o'shag, good stuff too. Fortnum an' Masion – highly class – there's a pie! Oh, my eye, cheese, honey – oh tell me that's honey! An' – wot's that? Smells right gamey..."

"Is a Frog thing. Potted meat," growls a lower voice from across the room, the owner of which she can't see.

"A toke o' bread – fresh!" gabbles Brash in glee. "Cask o'beer, pail o'milk, sugared almonds! Oh, Emmy give us a peck o'the sugared jewjaws, go on, say you will! Gin – oi, why's it red – wot's wrong with it?"

"Sloe gin."

"Wot's slow about it?"

Between the spilling baskets is cloth cut to clothes in a dark hue, a round shape of black felt lined in red...

"Emmy," Trusted coaxes, the figure resolving itself into Charlie. "Cool 'ere."

Her ears register a high-pitched and pathetic cry in search of attention. She obliges because no one in their right mind or wrong could possibly ignore such a pitiful demand.

Amidst the bundle of coat and hat (corduroy, male cut; battered; both familiar and smelling faintly of opium,) is a scrap of fur that wriggles and meeps and is being lifted and placed in her arms. A small bundle of skinny and frenetic warmth with sharp claws is latched onto the corsetry at her chest. Her fragmented thoughts coalesce to a single point of focus: a small muzzle and a pair of lambent golden eyes. Her cold fingers clasp it carefully, seeking to gentle its cries.

"Blind me – wot's that?" demands Brash. "An' wassit doin' in some toff's hat?"

"Shuttup, Jen," Charlie orders.

An angelic smile uncurls across Emmy's lips. "Ello, Jack," she whispers to the kitten. "Ain't you handsome? Real bone and benneh, you."

"It's a twist, Emmy," Charlie corrects absently, realising - lord help them all - the St Giles Witch now has a familiar and the gin millers something more to talk about around the pot.

"Jack," she says happily, petting the purring scrap of warmth.

In amidst the cheerful chaos Jen's causing, Charlie spies a note on a crisp leaf of cream paper. He swoops in a hand and snatches it up with all the deftness of a gull spearing fish – larceny via legerdemain was once his stock in trade. It isn't sealed, so he unfolds it. He knows this spread of largess is from the Marylebone Split - no one else who'd send Emmy anything had that unique combination of money, humour and taste – but he is curious what message he saw fit to commit to paper.

Charlie follows the loops of the script with his eyes as if he was writing them himself; Emmy spent many a long night teaching him his letters but it's not a skill that sits naturally with him. The three words above the wry flourish of 'S.H' mean little to him. He scowls at them as if by squinting he can castigate them into making sense. "Emmy?" he prompts. "Emmy – what's 'me max inna cullper' mean? It code?"

_"Mea maxima culpa,"_ she corrects absently with only a fraction of the attention she is lavishing on the diminutive feline.

"What's it mean?"

A hazy smile as she scratches the kitten under the chin and is rewarded with a purr that would make a lion jealous. "Means he thinks he owes me a favour." Her words are distracted, disinterested. London has the Don Jack back, she has a head that is no longer spinning, a toff's hat to put on it, and a small purring creature to hold. All is right with her world.

Charlie rolls his eyes, but finds himself grinning anyhow.

Sherlock Holmes deserved a kicking for all the trouble he'd caused; if it had fixed Emmy, Charlie would cheerfully have shivved him. But for that smile, that look of calm and contentment his gift had put on her face, Charlie feels unaccountably magnanimous. He could forgive the bloody Jack after all.

"Bone and benneh – what say we open up that gin?"

* * *

NOTES

A ream downy twist – a brilliantly clever girl

Jermyn Street – a street in Piccadilly, London, that contains a lot of historically established gentleman's tailors and was very fashionable in the late 1800s.

Fox and Lewis – a tobacconists on St James' St (still open today) frequented by Oscar Wilde.

Lock's – Lock & Co, a hatshop on St James' St founded in 1676 and, incidentally, where Holmes' fedora in the '09 film was purchased.

Fortnum's – Fortnum and Mason, a high-class grocers on the corner of Jermyn St, founded in 1707 (and a glorious place to shop!)

Turnbull & Asser – gentleman's clothier on Jermyn St, established in 1885.

Floris – a perfume shop in Jermyn St, founded in 1730.

Skrim o'shag – a packet of tobacco

Toke – a loaf

Marylebone Split - Baker Street detective, Holmes

Mea maxima culpa - Latin: My most grievous mistake

**There we are my darlings, all finished. Please leave me a note to say what you thought - it's only fair after all the hours I spent looking up thieves cant, old maps of Limehouse, opiate misuse and a hundred other foolish details =)**

PS - should anyone wish to see a drawing of Emmy (since I apparently fail at drawing SH), one can be found here - take the spaces out of the following address - http:/ /pics. livejournal. com/ wraithwitch/ pic/000yz7t9


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